The Skies of Rome
Observations about an exhibition of Roman landscapes
If architecture is a “fair, wise and magnificient game” (as Le Corbusier said), Petrucci’s art is architecture built with light and colour. It’s the method chosen by the master to give word to a message that also is the fundamental element of every approach to reality: it’s represented by a couple of “opposites” (what psychologists call polarities), one sprung from the world of memory and the other from the experience of the present.
Once again Petrucci – inflexible explorer of the frontiers of the chromatic and formal sensibilty – deals with the city of Rome. His vast production of material images – distinguished by dense colours spread out with a spatula – brings to light ancestral references, almost hardened scales, frozen by time and reproduced in an imaginary space, a mirror of reality. It’s not the first time that his art – always busy in investigating the expressive possibilities of substance and colour – deals with the sky. Still, Petrucci‘s colour introduces images of hope and energy – his Roman domes and skies appear as symbols of vitality and rebirth, as if painting was a model for living.
Everybody knows how the beauty Eternal City contributed to the world of culture. Petrucci’s paint, soaked in the city’s palette, is dense as architecture. The wide chromatic stretches have the thickness of a low relief. The classical style of the Roman monuments is an anchor thrown towards tradition, values and knowledge. In his compositions, our artist mirrors a classical style that emanates energy and feeds the messages through the eye and the spirit.
Petrucci‘s sensibility, the spontaneity of his spatula strokes and his sense of memory are the tools through which the artist builds an extraordinary artistic model, a bridge with the past, of which he brings back the composition modules, drawing the meaning of the city on a granular and rough surface. Throught the canvas, his poetry mirrors the elements of his artistic and personal development, in a mix of passions, memories, historical remembrances, and uninterrupted links between painting, sculpture, classical standards and contemporary experimentation.
His clear blue skies, his flaming twilights, his dark clouds and nocturnal landscapes tell us that light is the substance of space, and that colour forms his imaginary and ever-changing “walls”. Volume and colour are created by light, and light is the substance of Petrucci‘s art.
Arch. Ruggero Martines