Lucio Del Pezzo alla Dep Art Out

Dep Art Out and Fondazione Marconi are pleased to announce an event evening dedicated to the artist Lucio Del Pezzo. On Sunday, August 3rd, from 7 PM to 9 PM, the evocative trullo, the summer location of the Dep Art Gallery in Milan, will host a sculpture by the Neapolitan artist. The event is curated by Veronica Recchia.

Known for developing an artistic language where painting, sculpture, everyday objects, and symbols intertwine in a curious visual dialogue, Lucio Del Pezzo, Neapolitan by birth and training, together with Biasi, Di Bello, and others, is among the founders of the Gruppo 58 and the magazine "Documento Sud."
The exhibition honors one of the main themes of Del Pezzo's artistic research: the Casellario (File Cabinet). Introduced into his painting-sculptures already in the early 1960s, this element becomes one of the distinctive features of his language, finding its first autonomous and complete expression in 1968 in the work Visual Box.

His Neapolitan origin is indeed the fundamental key to understanding his artistic vision. Naples, a melting pot of cultures and traditions, sophisticated, mysterious, and magical, becomes a fertile ground from which to draw for the development of his own poetic language. During this early phase of experimentation, Del Pezzo's works, with a neo-Dadaist flavor, are populated with symbols, found objects, relics, and debris trapped beneath a thick layer of oil paint.

It is then the studies of archaeology undertaken in Greece, the Parisian experience during which the artist is deeply influenced by the dreamlike component of surrealism, and the move to Milan in the early '60s that orient his research towards a greater emphasis on forms and object elements.

While remaining central, the symbolic element is now organized within rigorous structures. Various forms, initially freely placed on shelves, are later compartmentalized into grids, compartments, and organized spaces. It is in this context that the Casellario is born, a compositional device within which, like a skilled archaeologist, the artist positions and organizes his finds. To the iconographic core of his early research, shapes borrowed from the paintings of de Chirico, Art Nouveau decorative apparatus, geometric structures, and architectural volumes are increasingly consciously integrated. These components are accompanied by formal suggestions from Egyptian and Byzantine art, reworked by Del Pezzo not as simple citations but as active elements of an autonomous alphabet.

Thus, in Visual Box and the four small file cabinets displayed in the exhibition, spheres, cylinders, and curvilinear elements are juxtaposed with pyramids, hourglasses, twisted columns, and decorative volumes that belong to the metaphysical and surrealist world.

These works evoke the imagery of the medieval bestiary or herbarium, where heterogeneous elements were collected and preserved as testimonies of the wonderful and the unknown. However, unlike those repertories, in Del Pezzo's works, there is no scientific or systematic classification, but the objects are playfully arranged according to the rules of chance.
For the artist, the Casellario is an archive of memories, where each compartment guards fragments of time, memories, and suggestions. The Casellario is a visual alphabet, a language that continuously renews itself and allows for personal and multiple interpretations.
Web: www.depart.it/it/evento-dep...