Bonjour Matisse, 2007

Piero Pizzi Cannella  

Piero Pizzi Cannella was born in 1955 at Rocca di Papa.

He starts to paint at a young age. From 1974 to 1977 he attends Alberto Ziveri's painting course at the Accademy of Fine Arts in Rome and at the same time he enrolls in the Philosophy course at the Sapienza.
The memory is, for over thirty years, the red string of Pizzi Cannella's extremely personal creative journey, expressed through a refined and enigmatic language of cryptic signs, of recurring symbolic traces of an almost esoteric meaning, like the jewel, the dried flower, the chair, the fan, the lizard, where life and the essence of a forgotten past, the nostalgia, the dreams and the collective memories of a present contingent and of a future project are metaphorically condensed.

From the performance in the forest of Rocca di Papa (1975) to the works inspired by the narrative art (1977), from the conceptual installations (1977-78) to the “Return to Painting” (1980). From poetry, from philosophy to the journey of the present-day research, in this site the historical-critical acknowledgment of Pizzi Cannella's works unwinds, one of the most emblematic and original artists of a generation that, beyond the schools, critics and market, is the author of a renewed vision of painting from the '80s to today.

Pizzi Cannella holds his first personal show in 1977, at the La Stanza Gallery of Rome. He sets up his studio in the ex pasta factory Cerere, in the San Lorenzo neighborhood, giving life, together with B. Ceccobelli, G. Dessi, G. Gallo, Nunzio and M. Tirelli, to the San Lorenzo School: he opens the studio to the public on the occasion of the “Ateliers” show, organized in 1984 by A. Bonito Olivia in the ex pasta factory Cerere.

In the same year he exposes Pizzi Cannella's work in Sargentini's L'Attico Gallery in the exhibition “Internals and Figures”, his first personal of oils on canvas, to which the personal shows at the Annina Nosei Gallery of New York, in Berlin at the Galerie Folker Skulima in 1985 and in Basilea at the Galerie Triebold in 1986 followed. He takes part in the collective expositions: The Biennial of Paris (1985), of Venice (1988, 1993), of Istanbul (1989), Quadrennium of Rome (1987), “Post-abstraction” at the Rotonda della Besana of Milan (1987), “Rome in show 1970-79” at the Exposition Palace of Rome (1995), “Italian art. The last forty years. Iconic painting” at the GAM of Bologna (1997), “Orientations of Italian art/Rome 1947-87” in Moscow and, later, in Leningrad. He participates in the first Biennial of Peking in 2003.