Piero Pizzi Cannella (Rocca di Papa 1955)

The artist, with whom we have had a relationship of esteem and collaboration since the 1990s, lives and works in Rome. Although he was trained in the prevailing period of conceptual art, Pizzi Cannella managed to free himself from dogmas, experimenting with new forms of expression and approaching process art in particular. In '77 he joined the group of 'La Stanza', a gallery founded the previous year on a self-managed basis by a few artists, with the sole aim of offering a place for free art. In the latter in '78 Pizzi Cannella organised his first solo exhibition. Shortly afterwards, the artist felt the need to abandon experimentalism and return to drawing and painting, referring in particular to the paintings of great artists of the past such as Pontormo, Caravaggio and Goya. In the mid-1980s, Pizzi Cannella's work was assimilated with that of Nunzio and Marco Tirelli in the last Roman school of Via del Paradiso, named after the street where Sargentini's gallery was located. He then exhibited in Via degli Ausoni, together with the other artists who had decided to move their work inside the old pasta factory. Pizzi Cannella paints works that are able to get to the essence of the object represented, stripped of everything superfluous.The artist works in cycles, such as Turkish Baths, Dry Flowers, Giolielli, Maps of the World, composing his work of signs and series of reiterated and codified figures. A sort of alphabet that binds his production and makes each work linked to a previous and a potential subsequent one. Female elements such as dresses, jewellery, fans and other objects that evoke the presence of women recur in the artist's pictorial language.