For the solo exhibition Piero Zuccaro. Glimmers of Matter, curated by Alberto Dambruoso, the Sicilian artist offers twenty works created in oil on canvas of large and medium size and ten pastels. In Piero Zuccaro’s works we find a single “drawn thread” that winds like a gesture where, both sign and chromaticism, result almost as an unknown writing not unlike the signs of a remote language: it is the language of nature with its four elements that returns to speak to us.
His works are the result of a compound return to painting that until a few years before seemed to have fallen into disuse: “A painting that we could define as of a fundamentally abstract although the echoes of a naturalistic inspiration can already be inferred from the titles of the works that basically tell us about the four elements of which our planet is composed: water, air, earth, fire. The latter are mostly dimensions evoked but never stated explicitly. In other words, they allude to something concrete but do not represent tout court the ultimate goal of his investigation” (A. Dambruoso).
Piero Zuccaro in these works has assimilated both the lesson of Informal art and the masters such as Ennio Morlotti and Attilio Forgioli for the use of matter made of lumps and drippings. They return also to mind the materials of Alberto Burri where the canvas became a game where “materials are colors, one can tune and orchestrate them in shadow and light. Colors are materials, pigments characterized, like any other matter, by a thickness (by a “quantity”) and a strong individuality. Form is form of matter as well as color.” The dense and material color, which so so much part has played in Zuccaro’s latest production, is the ultimate experience of his vision, of being able to see beyond the physical space made of matter fused with historical memory.
