Francesco Petruccelli
bangaloREsident@Daily Dump

Trash – the final state of matter?!
Petruccelli proposes to explore trash as the material expression of death and rebirth. Trash, especially plastic, has immense creative potential that the artist will use to induce new perceptions.

The artistic education of Francesco Petruccelli is based upon different studies and experiences.

Beginning with the studies of Art and Humanities at the Università degli Studi in Milan, continuing with the work of cameraman in places like Haiti and Congo and finally concluding his formal education with Fine Arts at the Universität der Künste in Berlin, he was able to develop a complex artistic language whose main characteristics are a certain intellectual - almost philosophical - density,  attention to the paradoxes of existence, and a visual description of psychological processes which is always precise and brutal at the same time.

Even in his first exhibitions (e.g. at Neurotitan in Berlin in 2014) he focuses his interest on the contradictions of identity: in his sculptures the head in particular is the battlefield of instincts and tensions which cannot find a solution. By combining the use of the archaic technique of the encaustic with the perception of the pedestal as psychological support of the sculpture, he depicts the problematic unity of the ego and its inconsistency.

His analysis of the mental processes deepens and broadens its horizons in works in which he dialogues with the theories of K.G. Jung: in Berlin for Schauwerk in 2015 and at erstererster gallery in 2016, the artist presented sculptures and paintings whose main theme was the absence – the metaphysical void which remains, once every judgement that we pass about things turns out to be partial and false.

From this perspective, his use of trash as material for his statues has an ontological meaning: trash is what has lost any cultural significance, it represents the absence of human values… and yet, it remains with its unknown life.

The abandoning of a subjective perspective becomes definitive in the works he presented between 2016 and 2017 at Cruise & Callas and Schillerpalais, among others: his paintings of paintings and radiographies not only deny the human perception of art, but also reveal the hidden, subconscious identity of an artwork.

On the other hand, in other paintings done with the collage technique the artist destroys every possible personal meaning, in order to give to the viewers an empty visual space to fill with their own content and association of ideas.

During the bangaloREsidency Francesco Petruccelli will work with Daily Dump to explore trash, its ambiguous condition of ultimate, entropic state of matter and key for a new cultural evolution at the same time. As material expression of death and rebirth, trash has immense creative potential that the artist will use to induce new perceptions of it.