This solo show of Sergio Ceccotti aims to trace, from a body of paintings from the last five decades, some of the key elements which form the framework of his painting since the end of the 1950s: cinema, thriller, voyeurism, metropolitan anxiety, contemporary alienation.
Sergio Ceccotti investigates the mystery of banality hidden in bourgeois interiors, hotel rooms and recognizable Roman or Parisian streets. His complex work, because real and fictional, narrative and elliptical, filled with seriousness and off-beat humour, gives rise to an enigmatic unquietness, to a questioning of the visible, which led writer Philippe Soupault to consider him the painter of the "unusual everyday".
A filmed interview and a text by Julie Borgeaud accompany the exhibition, by putting in perspective the works shown with other emblematic paintings from his corpus. Art historian and curator (Louis Soutter - Victor Hugo, La Maison Victor Hugo, Paris, 2015; Louis Soutter, le tremblement de la modernité, La Maison Rouge, Paris, 2011), she is also a director and film editor and, for the need of reconstituting the dismantled notebooks of Swiss artist Louis Soutter, she takes different techniques used in Forensic science in which she was trained. It is through her journey marked by common affinities with Ceccotti's painting that Julie Borgeaud attempts to draw out from the latter the multiple issues of such a work in the contemporary artistic landscape.
Born in 1935, Sergio Ceccotti lives and works in Rome. After training at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts under the direction of Oskar Kokoschka and at the French Academy in Rome, he shows his first works influenced by cubism, Giorgio De Chirico to whom he has been compared to his beginnings and, above all, German Expressionism. By taking up the codes of film noir and comic strips associated with a set of heterogeneous elements mixing classical and popular culture (literature, fictional characters, photo novels, rebuses, newspapers, television, etc.), he develops from the 1960s a more narrative painting that establishes the "ceccottian" style.
His work has been exhibited in numerous solo shows, such as recently at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome (2018) for the retrospective Il romanzo della pittura 1958-2018, at Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Buenos Aires (2015), Musei di Villa Torlonia – Casino dei Principe in Rome (2014), Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna in Anticoli Corrado (2004-2005), Upplands Konstmuseum in Uppsala (1993), Galleria Comunale di Arte Contemporanea of Arezzo (1987). It has also been included in many group shows such as Ah, che rebus – Cinque secoli di enigma fra arte e gioco in Italia at Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica in Rome (2010), Arte italiana dal 1968 al 2007 at Palazzo Reale in Milan (2007), Philippe Soupault, the unknown, love, poetry at BnF in Paris (1997), Die Kraft der Bilder at Martin-Gropius Bau in Berlin (1996), Italy today - Italia oggi at Villa Arson in Nice (1985), 1960-1977 Arte in Italia at Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna in Turin (1977). His work is part of many collections: Galleria Nazionale in Rome, MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, Galleria Comunale d'Arte Contemporanea di Arezzo, Lindenau-Museum Altenburg, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)…
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