It is the latest in a long series of exhibition opportunities – in institutional or private spaces, in Italy and abroad – that have helped consolidate the artist’s success since the early 2000s. The exhibition Tommaso Ottieri. Cosmologie urbane, curated by Gabriele Simongini, marks a further milestone in the career of a painter with a stylistic and iconographic signature that is simply unmistakable. Rome, Prague, Porto, Naples, Versailles: Ottieri’s poetics move between the cities of Europe and sumptuous theatres rich in velvet and gilded stucco, visions with an authentically baroque spirit
conceived by an artist ‘profoundly Neapolitan but equally intensely cosmopolitan’ as Simongini defines him. To get to the essence hidden behind the appearance of reality, Ottieri does not choose the path of minimalism: ‘I am interested in witnessing the astonishing effect of certain architectural atmospheres. I try to make what I paint seem majestic, enormous and enveloping’. Attempts that, when the composition is ignited by those torrential streams of light of which he has made his trademark, hit the mark, aligning, in terms of sumptuous spectacularity, his painting from ancient technique to the most daring and technological experiments in light art
that the 1920s of the new millennium are giving us.
