A speech by Professor Guido Canella

I feel indebted to Marco Petrus because he is more or less from the same generation as my children: I could be his father. My children began to bring home for me some of his catalogues, then two or three paintings and, little by little, when looking at these pictures I discovered a strange assonance between Marco’s research and my interests as a young man in looking at Milan. Milan, as we know, is a beautiful city for those who know how to discover it; it is sadly unshowy – that is, it is necessary to know it very well and, perhaps, have a little history in order to be able to appreciate its monuments. One of these is right here in front of the Stelline; it is one of the buildings that I most love and that I consider to be of absolute value. But Marco’s interest was one regarding a certain expanding area in the city, at least it seemed so to me, an interest that indeed arrived at the outskirts but that lingered above all on a district that came about during Milan’s first great expansion in the 1930s. This is a fairly particular and extraordinary district, in the sense that, differently from other Italian cities, which have a structure based on monuments, on perspective views guided in certain sense by empty spaces that in some way make more interesting the ones filled with monuments, this district of Milan is a kind of corridor, a channel; in other words, it is a district that shows how the Milan of the economic and commercial expansion of the 1930s, after the 1929 crisis, was a paratactic city, that is a city of sequences more than of syntaxes, of hierarchies. The interest in this city, and the fact of finding in this particular district of Milan a particular essence of the city, made me ask myself: “How could it inspire a young painter?”
Painted architecture and a painted city. I pondered and said to myself, “But is it possible to paint architecture?”, and I thought of de Chirico, for example the de Chirico of Ferrara where Metaphysical painting was born, or the de Chirico who passed through Turin on his way to the 1912 Paris Exposition where he showed his first Metaphysical pictures. He went in search of the Turin of Nietzsche, a city so well-ordered and, in a certain sense, so enigmatic. And then other cases came to mind. For example, I thought about Scipione, of Scipione’s Baroque Rome, this too captured through its monuments, in its gilded unravelling, and then obviously I thought of Sironi, the Sironi of the urban landscapes and of the outskirts, and the early paintings by Petrus seemed to me to be linked to this Sironi-like atmosphere: even though they call it expressionist, for me Sironi’s painting is indefinable. For those who do not live in and understand Milan – and of course I am speaking as an architect and not as a historian or art critic – I believe that it is indefinable, I believe there is something extra that escapes us. And then I thought of other cases; I thought of the Futurist Sant’Elia. But just where is Sant’Elia’s Futurism? To me it has always seemed that the Futurism in the architecture drawn and painted by Sant’Elia is a Wagnerschule Futurism, in other words one influenced by the Viennese Secession, and that there is little Futurism in it. Perhaps there had been some bullying on the part of the person guiding Futurism at the time. To exemplify: it is a city made up of monuments or gigantic buildings, but the base and grain of which is a Novecento grain, in other words a paratactic city. Petrus’s city is, above all, a city painted in the1930s, in the years of the Milanese Novecento movement. Even though not being experts, you will have certainly found details of buildings by Ponti, Gerla, even Pasquali, and by Muzio, Lancia and so on. And I said to myself, how come Marco Petrus is interested in these buildings? Why, I asked myself, not rationalist architecture, the rationalist white nakedness of which examples exist in Milan, Lombardy, Como? But then I realised that we had travelled from the 1930s to the post-war period and, not by chance, Petrus’s painting also included the architecture of those we call rationalist architects who after the war rediscovered bas-reliefs, cantilevers, and the rounding off of sharp corners. So there is a continuity, a choice of taste, we might say, in the sense of Lionello Venturi: a taste that is not just a fashionable rediscovery but something that was entrusted to this period, the constructive period of the city. The city, not its monuments. But what are the eye-catching monuments in Milan? How ugly Piazza del Duomo is! I know I might be hurting the patriotism of many Milanese, but Milan is a city that we must accept for its contradictions, its way of rejecting relationships of hierarchy, of references, of a conventional way of thinking, even though we Italians are used to Italian cities, and perhaps more than others (perhaps some Germans from the Rheine valley) we are used to understanding what the value is of a city and how it is denoted by its monuments.
But as I was saying, how come it was not rationalism that I found but those architects who were part of the Italian modern movement, of so-called Italian Rationalism, in this post-war change? I asked myself, always as an architect, isn’t it impossible to represent the city of rationalism? I forced myself to think and came up with Fernand Léger, for example, Le Corbusier’s favourite painter who painted builders and combined them with machines so that the figures became one with the machines. Then there were the painters of the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit, in other words the German New Objectivists, and it came to mind that did not this new objectivity, this making the subject the object of painting, derive from a kind of expressionist sublimation that slowly arrived virtually at a denial of deformation in order to propose the thing, the object as it is here and now? So I thought that by excavating the painting by Marco it would be possible to find a process that might be analogous, in other words a process that started from a painting I have at home and that, not by chance, I keep in my bedroom because before reading I often look at it. It is a painting that has an apartment block to the left with a kind of Novecento architecture, and to the right is what might be an industrial building or offices; so buildings from two different epochs and in the middle, like a river, runs a railway line with a wide curve that reminds me of the curves in certain paintings of the outskirts by Sironi; in them too there is this fact of giving the curvature the dynamism of the city that was becoming modern, that was becoming both industrial and commercial in the same place (unlike Turin, for example, which is wholly industrial), and this led my mind back to the city’s beginnings. And lastly, in this book he has given me (I remember that at a certain point I wrote to Marco to express my interest and esteem, also as a result of those assonances) there is something like an electric shock, something that suddenly explodes; for example, there is the abandonment of the Sironi-like darkness and the lights begin to blaze, these more than solar lights that are almost artificial and dazzling. The colours are no longer the halftones of modernity but are bright, risky, of an avant-garde modernity. And then there is the under/over aspect: there is a fragment of a building and then above it is almost the same fragment that opens up a space in the sky between these two elements; and then, at the end, in the most recent pieces, there is an almost kaleidoscopic vision, almost as though these images of this paratactic Milan enter into and open questions. I have read the fine words written by many authors and scholars of Petrus’s painting, and they quite rightly speak of a Milan that is paralleled by certain photographs, by certain images by Basilico, by a kind of Milanese landscape painting that is not metaphysical, not expressionist but realist (not in the sense we are used to giving to a certain period of Realism and Neo-realism), realist painting inasmuch as it is real. Instead, I think that behind these paintings, apart from all the truth that all these authors have brought to light, there is a kind of enigma of form. This is something of a counterpoint to what Alessandro Riva said a short while ago about “non-places”, which is by now a conventional term: a “non-place” is a search for the universal through a behaviour that is the same for the world’s scenario and that of our current society. It seems to me, instead, that Petrus’s enigma is a search for a different universal, a universal that in order to define itself as such must search within its own identity, in other words a defence line for identity, and I believe that Milan starts from that, not from landscape painting but from the built city, even the most banal and conventional part of the city if we want. This search for the essence of Milan is at the heart of this art research, and this enigma is still an enigma to solve, though not through painting; but it is an enigma that must in some way be confronted and organised by the city itself, by intelligent art, and by all those who consider themselves to be artists.