Elisabetta Barisoni,
Marco Petrus: from the general to the particular

On the occasion of the major exhibition dedicated to the Old Master of Venetian art Vittore Carpaccio, to be held at the Doge’s Palace, the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna renews its vocation of proposing innovative readings of the past through the lens of the present.
And it really is a lens we can speak of in the case of the new cycle of paintings by Marco Petrus, which emerges more or less directly from the Milanese painter’s viewing and careful study of the works of Carpaccio and Giovanni Mansueti. In particular, the series draws inspiration from the lines and patterns of the traditional Venetian braghe (breeches) donned by the figures in the large canvases on display in the Gallerie dell’Accademia. In the Capricci series, the primitivism of the Old Masters becomes a mental translation that abstracts a detail of the painting or pictorial cycle and blows it up on the canvas. The process starts with a meticulous analysis of such decorative details, developing through the repetition and reproduction of the chromatic textures, while finally becoming explicit in the reflection and inflection of the rhythms that emerge from it. In this way, a major installation comes into being, one that takes on the dimensions and significance of a new pictorial cycle.
Over the past centuries, the linear and iconic forms of Carpaccio’s and Mansueti’s masterpieces have been a source of fascination for many Synthetist and Symbolist authors “in search of pre-academic primitivism,”1 as well as for many champions of the Italian return to order and magic realism. The truth and simplicity of the Old Masters and at the same time the sense of suspension and restlessness that reverberates in the pictorial cycles or paintings—one of which is Carpaccio’s Due Dame (“Two Ladies”), as interpreted by John Ruskin—echo in the cities that Petrus has quietly experienced throughout his more recent production. It is no coincidence that numerous art historians and critics associated with the architectural language and the period of the Italian return to order have written about the quality and distinctiveness of his painting.
Petrus’s art does not make use of figuration, in keeping with the exponents of early twentieth-century abstractionism, for in a certain way figuration disturbs the rendering of rhythm, color, and music. Nor do narrative or decorative aspects come into Petrus’s painting, for—especially in his famous visions of the city of Milan—concentration is maximized to yield a photographic gaze, the architecture steeped in silence, the secret correspondences to be found in our daily lives. They echo Sironi’s synthesis and the compositional and constructive will of the 1920s and 1930s, Hopper’s silences, and Morandi’s isolation of the object. In Capricci, Petrus’s geometries seem to turn into music, shifting between harmony and disharmony, and are governed by synthesis and essentiality. Rhythm must be sought, wrote Elena Pontiggia of Petrus’s cities, and likewise in these new works, the artist rediscovers rhythm by applying his peculiar lens not to visions and urban views but to details: those of history. There is no tragedy in Petrus’s works: “However, a subtle restlessness underlies his most recent works: the notion of the infinite addends that cannot lead to a sum, for the sum—the final destination—does not exist.”2
If Alessandro Mendini, while commenting on his production, spoke of “architecture viewed as a subspecies of painting,” in the case of Capricci the perspective is turned on its head: painting is rendered as a subspecies of architecture.3 We must not be misled by the title of the series. Capricci is not meant in the traditional sense as of the term “capriccios,” for indeed the works are not extemporaneous frivolities but rather express a slow sedimentation and reflection on ancient materials and the masters of Venetian primitive art. Petrus toys with the ambiguity of the title. Are they Capricci insofar as they stand out as a unique feature in his production, at least thus far, or because they recall the compositional typology of the constructed view that accompanied Venetian painting throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? On closer inspection, the combinations and reproductions of the Capricci do not foresee inventions in the classical sense of the term, but rather act on the meaning of enlargement, of the blow-up taken from the antique image, which is thereby de-contextualized and turned into aniconic and contemporary matter. Capricci is a project that should not be read as a series of individual works but as one large-scale installation, leading from the general to the particular. The two rooms of Ca’ Pesaro thus become a single site-specific work where detailed scans of polyptych compositions are laid out, recalling classical architecture and the relationship of painting with the decoration of environments (seen in schools, confraternities, and churches, even prior to the Venetian palazzos), in keeping with what Fulvio Irace previously pointed out: “Like a painter of icons, Petrus believes in the salvific value of Architecture: a source of both mystery and adoration.”4
The Capricci cycle envelops the visitor in a universe of repeated and regular textures in which small variations and iconographic references may be glimpsed, yet whose real protagonists are line and color. The result is an abstract composition, monumental in scale but not rhetorical and ultimately anti-classical. In the meshes of the chromatic “fabric” of Capricci there are deformations, optical refractions, and adjustments which speak the language of our time. Petrus’s work is abstract, yet in the ambiguous sense of the term that already led Alfred Barr to question it in 1936: “This is not to deny that the adjective ‘abstract’ is confusing and even paradoxical, For an ‘abstract’ painting is really a most positively concrete painting since it confines the attention to its immediate, sensuous, physical surface far more than does the canvas of a sunset or a portrait. The adjective is confusing, too, because it has the implications of both a verb and a noun. The verb to abstract means to draw out of or away from. But the noun abstraction is something already drawn out of or away from—so much so that like a geometrical figure or an amorphous silhouette it may have no apparent relation to concrete reality.”5
Capricci constitutes a point of arrival of the lengthy research that Petrus has carried out over the years to identify the beauty that underpins our way of living and seeing. A beauty the artist finds in geometry, sought out in contemporary cities, in the compositional modules of the classical tradition, and even in the descriptive details of the Old Masters. Thus, all of Petrus’s art becomes a sort of magical and atemporal invitation to look, to find the hidden rhythms in what we see and capture them on the canvas. Having shunned the liquidity of the present time, the hic et nunc in which we are immersed, Petrus does not hesitate before unleashing sharp geometrical strips with pure colors to define a time both suspended and eternal. The result is one of great potency without precariousness, of almost spiritual suspension. Petrus’s new series hosted at Ca’ Pesaro, closely bound up with Carpaccio’s masterpieces on show in the Doge’s Palace, may also be read as a great ode to painting itself and a passionate homage to the infinite refractions and timeless rhythms of our beloved Venice.

1 On these issues, see A. Bellieni, “Carpaccio nel XIX secolo: verso un’interpretazione moderna,” in Vittore Carpaccio. Washington, National Gallery of Art, November 20, 2022 – February 12, 2023; Venice, Palazzo Ducale, Appartamento del Doge, March 18 – June 18, 2023, pp. 99–107.
2 E. Pontiggia, Dalla rappresentazione al ritmo, in Marco Petrus. Antologica. 2003–2017, catalogue of the exhibition curated by E. Pontiggia, Catanzaro, Museo MARCA, May 13 – August 20, 2018, Marsilio, Venice 2018, p. 14.
3 A. Mendini in Marco Petrus. Synchronicity, Milan 2011.
4 F. Irace, “Pittore di icone”, in Petrus, Milan, 2008.
5 A.H. Barr, “Introduction. The early twentieth century” and “Abstract,” in Cubism and Abstract Art, catalogue of the exhibition curated by A. H. Barr Jr., Museum of Modern Art, New York 1936.