Michele Bonuomo,
The views, vedutas, and capriccios of Marco Petrus

In his opening to Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes reveals the extremes of the method he applied in order to bring order to what he had observed during a trip to Japan: a place where he verified how the practice of the sign—more than any other expressive discipline—can give form and substance to a far broader system of representation. Today, re-reading his excursus into the “land of writing,” punctuated by sudden conceptual illuminations and unexpected visual appearances that are only apparently obvious, we are comforted by his provision of a scheme of thought that also allows us to clarify the practice and fate of painting in our own times: “The text does not ‘gloss’ the images, which do not ‘illustrate’ the text. For me, each has been no more than the onset of a kind of visual uncertainty, analogous perhaps to that loss of meaning Zen calls a satori. Text and image, interlacing, seek to ensure the circulation and exchange of these signifiers: body, face, writing; and in them to read the retreat of signs.”(1) For Barthes, a sudden impression or a fleeting illumination such as those, for example, that form a haiku—the poetic composition par excellence in the Japanese tradition—is not transformed into a description but declares itself to be a “retainable” instant: a fragment whittled down to its very essence, so as to reconnect distant echoes and visions, remote memories and future nostalgia.
That practiced by Barthes is a method perfectly suited to the coherent and uninterrupted evolution of Marco Petrus’s painting discipline, which in the Capricci cycle—also developed with Zen-like discipline—finds a point of arrival of a long and rigorous research process, and a trigger for new experiences and pictorial statements. Going beyond his past and iconic visions of the “uninhabited city” steeped in twentieth-century imagery—those now famous images, in which an iconic architectural episode would be solidified in an absolute form on the very edge of abstraction, and the ones that characterized him as one of the most authoritative Italian painters of his generation—and subsequently narrowing and reducing his point of view to the lenticular fragments of the Matrici cycle, provoked by the “controversial beauty” of the infamous Italian tower blocks known as the “Vele di Secondigliano,” Petrus gives shape to the “fragment-worlds” of his Capricci: powerful expressive splinters that take their cue from illuminations unearthed and dug out from famously dense fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venetian canvases. Details perhaps marginal to the casual observer, yet of great importance to him. The impression accelerated in Petrus by these sudden visual flashes and his own profound memory of art history give rise to a sort of mise en abîme of his own pictorial vision. And thus, the “fragment of a fragment,” deposited in the deepest recesses of the great tradition, activates a rigorous mechanism of formal reflection.
Of the very many details to be found in the complex vedutist mechanism that is the Miracle of the Relic of the Cross at the Ponte di Rialto, painted by Vittore Carpaccio between 1492 and 1494, and of the others that fill The Miraculous Healing of the Daughter of Benvegnudo of San Polo, painted a few years later by Giovanni Mansueti (1502), two Venetian stages brought to life by a studied and rational imagination, Petrus chooses those that allow him to transform the concept of the “view” into an autonomous and original “point of view.” In doing so, he focuses on a detail that at first sight appears irrelevant to the overall narrative—in this case, the lines of force and the dynamism triggered by the breeches of a valet or a gondolier, extras no less meaningful than the other protagonists of the entire pictorial representation—but which, once discovered, become emblematic of the pictorial enmeshing of the two Venetian masters and paradigmatic of the definition that Petrus deploys in a visual game that goes well beyond formal citation. The vedutist complexity of sublime “optical truth” to be found in Carpaccio and Mansueti accelerates in Petrus a mechanism of elaboration of dynamic forms that generate geometries of color and signs in continuous transformation, like a sort of contrapuntal exercise played on a single musical theme.
Petrus’s “point of view,” as affirmed in the Capricci cycle, despite setting out from that notion of the “view” that characterized his previous research, differs from it by opening up to an even more rarefied and absolute exercise in memory. Hence, in these most recent canvases, the pretext becomes text while the subtext becomes explicit. A point of view, therefore, that has always been supported by his notion of painting: i.e. feeling part of a mystery that is almost impossible to explain through schemes that are all too often reductive and biased, and that over time and in so many cases have curtailed the deeper sense of painting. Thus, a mystery that does not demand to be explained, but which obliges those who approach it to celebrate it without declamatory emphasis and in the most sacred of silences. It must be for this reason that the written word—understood as a shared code through which to address and to bear witness to the existent—was only established long after the absolute and magical gesture left by the imprint of a hand in the darkness of a primordial cave: the first point of view on the world, the founding gesture of painting and the seminal image that man was able to render of himself. “Any picture,” write David Hockney and Martin Gayford, “is an account of looking at something […]. The first person to draw a little animal was watched by someone else, and when that other person saw that creature again, he would have seen it a bit more clearly. That’s true of the bull painted in a cave in south-western France 17,000 years ago. The image was that artist’s testimony, made of a surface, of seeing this creature, not the thing itself. That’s all a picture can be.”(2)
The Capricci are Marco Petrus’s point of view on the events that made the Italian painting tradition so great and indispensable. The same tradition that today allows him to find fragments of the contemporary in Carpaccio and Mansueti’s crowded “theatres” and to decline them, for example, with the luminous dynamism of Giacomo Balla, with the formal rigor of Mario Sironi, with the chromatic and rational scores of Atanasio Soldati, Luigi Veronesi, and Manlio Rho, with the abstractions of Mario Radice, Mauro Reggiani, and Alberto Magnelli or with the more rarefied ones of Piero Dorazio. This is the pantheon in which Petrus honors the tutelary deities of his painting, well aware of the importance of belonging to a tradition that, as Gustav Mahler stated, is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire. Today, now that “painted painting” has finally regained centrality in art practices—after all too many futile variations and deviations of unnerving contemporary-ist academicisms and despite the excesses of pre-textual ideologisms and censorship dictated by unbearably “politically correct” stances—it has become urgent to reaffirm a principle of adherence to the formal, conceptual, and ethical foundations that bear witness to one’s own history, that declare and defend points of view that do not give way to standardization and to unconditional surrender before an unacceptable dictatorship of dominant thought.
The whole history of Marco Petrus’s art lies in the furrow of a strong and continuous Italian identity—one at times alluded to in the interplay of memories, at other times concentrated in an abstract fragment or in those sudden visual trembles and loss of the senses spoken of by Barthes, produced by an illumination never reduced to mere description. The Capricci cycle is an excellent testimony of this. In the pantheon of the great Italian tradition, there is also an altar for Marco Petrus.

(1) Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, Hill and Wang, 1982.
(2) David Hockney & Martin Gayford, A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen. Thames Hudson, 2016.