Sete

"Every city receives its form from the desert it opposes; and so the camel driver and the sailor see Despina, a border city between two deserts." Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Vintage Publishing, 1997 In Italo Calvino’s story, Despina is a border city between two deserts, one of sand, the other of water. Through a projective movement, the camel driver and the sailor observe it from two antithetical perspectives. The camel driver looks at the city as a vessel that might carry him away from the desert; conversely, the sailor sees it as a camel that might carry him away from the desert of the sea, toward oases of fresh water. In this mirror-play, which is linked as much to desire as to the direction of the gaze, the city becomes a border space and a threshold where the inversion of directions produces two different forms of crossing. In the new series of works produced by Pietro Moretti for the solo exhibition entitled Sete (Thirst), the "threshold city" is caught between two forms of tension, one linked to desire, the other metaphorically bound to the difficulty of quenching and directing that very desire. The figures inhabiting this new cycle of works are called to confront their own irreducible fragilities, clashing despite themselves with two different conditions of repression of the primal drive, on one hand, limitation and ambition, sometimes misplaced, on the other, control and surveillance, to be understood certainly as archetypes, but also as coordinates of our present time. The thirst these figures possess causes them to plunge, change direction, imagine an elsewhere, and oppose, as if in a collective body that moves and changes, resists and narrates along with the city. This series of works presents itself as a natural extension of two previous moments – corresponding to two exhibition projects, Selve and Corpi Santi – but, at the same time, also as a decisive evolution both in terms of painterly practice and thematic cores. The threshold-city, the urban anatomy, and the interiors represent the spatial coordinates in which water is symbolically dominant: it appears as an incessant flow in the form of rain, or as a river, or even in the form of vapor - owing to a certain dustlike consistency that the painting takes on; and it appears, right from the title Sete, as an ardent desire of the body that pours its fluids outward to flood the spaces, shaping a possible, and dystopian, elsewhere. The compositions that Moretti brings to life are born from the overlapping and analogy of narrative devices and, more broadly, from a certain capacity to look inside and outside of things, lingering on eccentric aspects, eternally suspended between a waking state and a preconscious dreamlike stage. The recurring topoi - contemporary archetypes such as the body, human and interspecies relations, the bar, the street, the city - succeed one another to compose an a-logical system where reality and fiction blur, ultimately dissolving their mutual boundaries. In this infra-thin space, the immanence of Moretti’s pictorial lexicon dwells in the ability to signify a multiverse made of associative oddities and improbable twists. The waitress plunging from a building while a sly cat observes her from a window and another woman leans out, offering her a champagne flute, generates a short circuit that questions us on the absolute unpredictability of what is being observed. Drawing heavily from the mundane mysticism of literature - particularly from the novel and the short story - as well as from current events, the dimension these works possess resides in the ability to redirect referents by reinventing them, and in the potential to interrupt the ordinary through unforeseen patterns that generate the composition from a "coup de dés", linking issues of a social and political order starting from a situated personal posture. The uncanny therefore comes into action as a sacred estrangement from representation, through the framework of the fairy tale or the short story, but also through the appropriation of history and daily life, called upon to narrate spaces of care and desire, and of political bodies. In the scenes taking place along the streets of a city immersed in a never-dark night, the recurring figures are those of waiters and waitresses, individuals crossing semi-deserted streets, or indoor groups telling a broader story - as in the large painting of a café that echoes the pictorial cycle Café Deutschland (1977-83) by the German artist Jörg Immendorff. Here, the indoor space - into which the city enters from the glass window in the background, where the cold light of police car flashers counterpoints the warm light of a candle placed on the table - is a space where antithetical forces converge: resistance and repression, proximity and distance. A migrant family fleeing forced repatriation and a group of unaware night-time customers intent on consuming their drinks share the scene. Ambiguity becomes a semantic strategy, a guiding principle that sustains the relationships between subjects, and their connections with the place. In Moretti’s practice, a laborious process turns the colored watercolor sketch not merely into a preliminary study phase, but into a formal device that potentially contains the aura of the image subsequently developed on canvas, painted in oil, and with formats ranging from medium to large. The composition develops through this dual movement, inside and outside the canvas, with color fields that, veiling after veiling, restore a certain aquatic density to the surface, a dust-like characteristic of the chromatic matter vibrating with acid and earthy hues based, in the works on display, on a dominant palette of yellow, ochre, red, magenta, blue, and green.