Baroque and contemporary in Marco Eusepi’s paintings on view in Noto

Baroque and contemporary, two dimensions in dialogue beyond time but deeply in space and through the universal language of painting. In Noto, a Sicilian Unesco Heritage town, included in the site of the “Late Baroque Towns of the Val di Noto”, the spaces of Palazzo Trigona, sumptuous monumental architecture with its characteristic nine pot-bellied balconies, open to the public for the first time in 40 years, to host the works of Marco Eusepi, on the occasion of “Gardens”, an exhibition presented by the Eduardo Secci Gallery, based in Florence and Milan, and curated by Pier Paolo Pancotto. Born in 1991, in Anzio, Eusepi personally chose the rooms to be dedicated to the exhibition, laden with ornaments and stuccoes, frescoes and wall paintings, which come into contact with the works, pictorial works on canvas and on paper, of small and large dimensions.

A phantasmagoria of forms, elements, colours, suggestions and encroachments, expressing Eusepi’s research into the medium of painting. Snippets of nature and glimpses of landscape are the subjects portrayed and re-elaborated by the artist, starting from the tradition of the genre to arrive at a contemporary vision, fragmentary or cohesive, between lines, backgrounds and spots that advance and retreat from the surface. In his pictorial grammar, the surface becomes a field of formal deconstruction in which different planes merge, questioning compositional hierarchies through the creation of new material organisms.

Autobiographical Landscapes

“The works find their place in the evocative rooms of the Baroque building, Palazzo Trigona di Cannicarao, integrating themselves integrally with them, almost as if they had always been there and only now revealing their presence. Many of them, in fact, were conceived by the artist for the occasion and, united with the others, they give rise to a sort of large installation that, without a break in continuity, unfolds in the palace, emphasising the environmental character that Eusepi’s pictorial syntax is capable of generating,” explained Pancotto in the critical text accompanying the exhibition.

“The works, all dated between 2019 and 2022, have as their subject landscapes or vegetal elements that, following a chromatic range that is sometimes more faithful to reality and sometimes more fanciful, emerge from the light background of the paper with the same unbridled speed with which they run through the artist’s gaze and heart in everyday life,” the curator continued. “In short, this is how his operating system could be summed up: relying on the rapidity of a pictorial gesture to convey the immediacy of a sensation – mostly aroused by nature – and thus making the spectators participate in it, sharing with them the perceptive experience that gave rise to it; spontaneously, without resorting to any artifice, just as, following the natural course of things, the event took place. In this sense, these flowers, these views take on an almost autobiographical character, given the intimate nature that determined them’.