The paintings that Paolo Petrucci chose for this exhibition were created during his stay in the USA – they’re a sort of diary in which, day by day, he wrote down his feelings about this new and disconcerting world. In his recollection there’s a sense of astonished anxiety, something hallucinating about the adventure experienced in the inhuman landscape, ruled by a geometry of enormous masses of concrete, that is New York City.
The giant and suffocating buildings, the perspectives imbued with impenetrable walls, the privation of a natural horizon, the lack of whatever sign of human life, the aggressive dissonances of the neon signs live again in a bulky substance which exalts their chromatic values and exhalts in an expressionistic way the feeling of dismay and loneliness.
Jacopo Recupero, 1967
A couple of years ago we witnessed the promising debut of the young Petrucci – his work presented landscapes and country fields in summer, in which the violence of light concentrated itself in clots and dense layers of colour… There’s no doubt that the artist has gone forward (you can see it in the beautiful pastel drawings) on the path that he chose to travel, that of a style that is neither lyrical nor contemplative, but aggressive, dramatic and full of passion.
Gino Visentini, Il Messaggero – May 23, 1967