Nicola Nannini. Signs of life

Exhibition catalog “Nicola Nannini. Signs of life" presented by 24 October 2023 to the 31 January 2024 to galleria AreaB of Milan. In the personal, curata da Ivan Quaroni, approximately twenty unpublished paintings and a large installation made up of twenty small canvases are on display, to represent, i received, the evolution of the artist's research on landscape and, the second, an evolution of his investigation into the typological portrait.

For the Milanese exhibition Nicola Nannini specifically produced - on canvas and on panel - a corpus of characterized works, like his most recent production, from the interpolation between landscape and portrait, deepening the dialogue between these two genres while reserving a measure of autonomy for each.

In Nannini's visual stories, in fact, on one side we find the houses of the lower Po Valley, immersed in a depopulated and silent plain, which have become a symbol of a condition of archetypal and universal provinciality; on the other, a plethora of characters who maintain an incongruous relationship with this landscape.

Alongside what appear to be typical local inhabitants, in fact, we find figures catapulted from another geographical and cultural context, that of America in the fifties or, better, of its fictional and cinematographic representation.

This alteration of space/time continuity - which is also the sign of a "happy expressive freedom of the artist", observes the curator – serves to underline the universal character of certain images.