LUCA PIGNATELLI
Wendy N.E. Ikemoto
“I don’t know why, but I’m always painting Pompeii and New York”, said Luca Pignatelli. “New York is like a costola of Europe – a rib"
Wendy N. E. Ikemoto, Luca Pignatelli, Catalogue of the exhibition "Scenes of New York City - The Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld Collection", New York Historical Society, New York, 22 October 2021 - 7 August 2022.
LUCA PIGNATELLI. UNDATED WORK
Sergio Risaliti
Luca Pignatelli is known in Italy and throughout the world for his images of an archaeological character and for a process of gathering, retrieval, custody and iconographic editing of history and art.
Sergio Risaliti, Undated Work. Catalogue of the exhibition "Undated Work", Museo Stefano Bardini, Firenze, 2019
PERSEOLI. REFLECTIONS OF THE RESIDUAL
Elena Lydia Scipioni
Persepoli (2016) is the work that gives this exhibition its title and which, together with Lotta (2017), leverages an aspect concerning the poetics of the residual. As reconsidered discard, the residual has always featured in the material experimentation which Luca Pignatelli has carried out in his works over the course of his research.
Elena Lydia Scipioni, Persepoli. Riflessi del residuo. Catalogo della mostra "Persepoli", Teatro la Fenice di Venezia, 12 Maggio - 18 Giugno 2017.
LUCA PIGNATELLI: THE ANTIQUE AS DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION
Arturo Carlo Quintavalle
Migrants is a series of nine works in mixed media on wood. One of them, Mithridates King of Pontus, has entered the collections of the Uffizi.
To understand Pignatelli’s work, his research, you need to picture his studio: a shed with several rooms around it, strong light more or less everywhere, and then a lower level where everything is dark and artificially lit. Here, stacked against the wall, are dozens of works, survivors from earlier research: the series of antique vases, the series of stations and locomotives, the series of aeroplanes, the series of tigers, the series of airships.
A. Natali, A. C. Quintavalle, Luca Pignatelli, Migranti, Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze, 2015
TEMPUS ELEVAT OMNIA
Antonio Natali
One of the rightly most famous and critically significant passages in Vasari’s lives can be found in the ‘Preface’ that the biographer from Arezzo wrote, towards the middle of the 16th century, for the third and last part of his lucid manual of art history. It is a crucial passage as it expresses with unwavering clarity his belief regarding the origin of one of the highest periods in Italian figurative culture. The period is the one he defined as that of the ‘modern manner’; modern because he was talking about his own time.
A. Natali, A. C. Quintavalle, Luca Pignatelli, Migranti, Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze, 2015
THE IMMANENCE OF ART IN THE WORK OF LUCA PIGNATELLI
Achille Bonito Oliva
“Each experimental initiative requires a delirious yet extremely lucid interpretation” (Klossowski). The relationship between Luca Pignatelli and language is based on the reflection that it represents the whole of reality that needs to be addressed. It is the start- ing point for carrying out the experimentation with a potential tear that can underpin a new framework.
A.B. Oliva, M. Bonuomo, A. Tecce, F. Vona, Luca Pignatelli, Museo di Capodimonte, Napoli, Arte’m Editore, Napoli, 2014
ICONS UNPLUGGED
Luca Beatrice
In This Must Be The Place, the latest, beautiful film by Paolo Sorrentino, Cheyenne, the old rockstar played by Sean Penn, has stopped playing long ago.
A young boy who asks him to sing This Must Be The Place by Arcade Fire persuades him to pick up the guitar again.
Beatrice, Fokidis,Fusco, Renzitti, Veca, Icons Unplugged, Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica,Roma,Allemandi Editore,2011
A NEAPOLITAN CONVERSATION: LUCA PIGNATELLI AT CAPODIMONTE
Michele Bonuomo
It all began in 1978 when Raffaello Causa, the head of the artistic heritage office and the gallery owner Lucio Amelio organised a retrospective exhibition devoted to the work of Alberto Burri, a living artist. It was the very first time that contemporary art had made such a strong impression in the Museum of Capodimonte. To mark the occasion Burri, a gruff artist from Città di Castello, had prepared a surprise.
A.B. Oliva, M. Bonuomo, A. Tecce, F. Vona, Luca Pignatelli, Museo di Capodimonte, Napoli, Arte’m Editore, Napoli, 2014
ICONS BY LUCA PIGNATELLI
Salvatore Veca
For observers Luca Pignatelli’s work generates a field of tension between proximity and distance. His archaeology of forms and gazes evokes the famous 20th-century image of the Angelus Novus that, in the storm, stretches out towards the future with its face turned to the past. For those of us who are waverers, the work tells us of the artist, the icons of Classical sculpture are the memo of a lost and uncanny equilibrium, and the wounds and cracks and lacerations of the city of Piranesi announce the signs of the threat and imminence of the storm.
A.B. Oliva, M. Bonuomo, A. Tecce, F. Vona, Luca Pignatelli, Museo di Capodimonte, Napoli, Arte’m Editore, Napoli, 2014
JUST PAPER. SIGNS AND DRAWINGS BY LUCA PIGNATELLI
Michele Bonuomo
Luca Pignatelli walks over sheets of paper leaving his footprints as he paces. He explores them
almost as if they were uncharted territory and measures them in great strides, marking out the confines
of a new and mysterious experience. His design moves between the sense of discovery and that of measure:
a secret, unstoppable action that has always fuelled his artistic discipline.
M. Bonuomo, Luca Pignatelli, Off Paper, Galleria M77, Milano – St Moritz, 2015
PALIMPSEST
Angela Tecce
Obscurity, darkness, the emergence of figures reduced to occasionally indistin- guishable outlines, the awareness of a story that takes place at a deeper level beyond the images, of which we can only grasp traces, seemingly unambiguous but always poised between arbitrariness, absurdity and the improbable....in a complex, expressive way, the entire poetic heritage of Luca Pignatelli refers to a dream-like experience not linked directly to the dream world but to his beloved paraphrase of it: the imaginary world of cinema.
A.B. Oliva, M. Bonuomo, A. Tecce, F. Vona, Luca Pignatelli, Museo di Capodimonte, Napoli, Arte’m Editore, Napoli, 2014
LUCA'S SPATIO-TEMPORAL DIMENSIONS
Antonella Renzitti
Photographer of dreams,1 visionary architect, standard-bearer of painted cinema,2 impertinent visionary,3 since his debut,4 Luca Pignatelli has been defined as an artist capable of crossing linguistic confines with an uncommon poetic liberty. A master, in particular, of allowing himself to be captivated by thought-provoking anonymous photographs, he increasingly orients his artistic research towards the development of pre-existing images, which he collects in an almost scientific way in his very beautiful “iconographic library”.
Beatrice, Fokidis,Fusco, Renzitti, Veca, Icons Unplugged, Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica,Roma,Allemandi Editore,2011