Excerpt by Exhibit Curator Lorenzo Nannelli

I’m fascinated, captivated and amused by the appeal of the obvious. There’s nothing easy in simplicity, or in the search for it, and I’d dare to say that this is how great truths manifest themselves. I content myself in looking at the result of a certainly complex work, I’m satisfied by the coming into being of his bright, immediate, unmistakable stories. The path leading to all of this remains hidden, as if everything had come out of the blue, at once, in the fresh epiphany of an evening spent drawing.

There is nothing involute even if nothing is really what it looks like, as the artist himself explains: “I believe that a work of art should contain an enigma, that it should contain a question instead of providing an answer”. The question is indeed an inexhaustible openness, an endless possibility.

The elements and tools used by Piussi, which seems so close to the world of comic strips, are actually extremely old; the imagery belongs to a world brought down to its essence as in the art of Antelami in Parma or Wiligelmon in Modena: the deepest essence that lays in gestures and actions. There’s no resting on excessive details: they are understandable to everyone and everyone can pass on a message, an emotion, a moment of enlightenment.

Motionless forms, both obvious and evocative, are pure, ancient and again so contemporary. It’s the portrait of an idea, a situation that serves the storytelling. There’s a rejection of a cold and tortuous expression in order to remain pure, childlike, closer to the initiatory language of the tales of old, which could contain hidden and unspeakable truths.

The drawing style is lean, precise, with perfect contours. It defines and builds only to immediately fall prey to colour. Piussi opens a hidden door, he leads our gaze to a world that swallows us, based on a contemporary reality, while also showing us an alluring alternative that suddenly absorb us and makes us a part of its conversations, of its crystal clear daily life. And so it happens, almost by magic, to turn the eye and recognize the images around us, to see through their eyes, and this is no dream, but a possibility, a solution to our most ordinary days.

The exhibit is part of the "CertaldoArte2023" exhibition, organized by the Municipality of Certaldo with the patronage of the presidency of the Regional Council of Tuscany, with the coordination and installation project of Exponent. Exhibition curated by Lorenzo Nannelli, in collaboration with Galleria d'Arte Nozzoli.

Giacomo Piussi

The artist, originally from Udine but Florentine by adoption, has exhibited in Siena, Forlì, Florence, Bari, Milan, Rome and Paris and has collaborated in numerous group exhibitions in Lisbon and Amsterdam. He expresses himself through painting, bronze sculpture, stone and terracotta bas-reliefs, murals. On a pictorial level, he prefers a figurative language made up of elementary forms, based on themes used in profane painting from the end of the 18th century onwards, with particular attention to the themes of bourgeois representation of the end of the 19th century: rural scenes, of toilets or people in the interior.