Pietro Fortuna — Novitas

In the year of Matera European Capital of Culture, the Murgia Materana Park welcomes Saturday, September 21, 2019 at 11:00 am, at the "Belvedere Piccolo" the sculptural work of Pietro Fortuna.

There where the beauty of nature is accompanied by traces of Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures, which are the charm and attraction of the Park, Pietro Fortuna grafts his work designed specifically for this unique site. New is, in fact, the work of the artist who bears witness to his and our present, but which also refers to original and founding themes of the culture that unites us. It is not by chance that Fortuna preserves in its title the Latin form of Novitas, that is, the new understood in the opening of life. As the essence of life finds its full determination in the creative process of self-reproduction and continuous growth. 

The work consists of five separate iron elements, structured in an arc thanks to the folding of the sheets that make them up.  Each of them acts as a support for as many objects created by the artist that use the fold as a germinative element. A movement similar to the infinite folds of the panoramic view that captures the landscape that hosts the installation, but also to the curve of memory that makes us relive the memory of the famous film by Pasolini dedicated to the Gospel of Matthew and shot in these same places; a reference to the death of Christ as a founding act of historical memory and, at the same time, as an immemorial event of the spirit.       

The work, however, is in itself conceived as an open text, never reducible to a symbolic, metaphorical or literary interpretation, so that it does not offer the observer an univocal answer or meaning. Rather, it commits the observer to go back to the sense, that is, to the reason that pushes him to look for correspondences, for facts, in order to get into the same groove of doing that is thought at all times. Doing and thinking coincide in Fortuna's work.

Pietro Fortuna is a leading exponent of the artistic tendencies that have emerged since the mid-eighties, a time when, in Italy and abroad, there was an urgent need for an art linked to deep reflection and not only to creative emotionality.

He has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries in our country, with a continuous international response increased by his move from Rome to Brussels.

The presentation of Novitas is the result of the collaboration between the Ente Parco della Murgia Materana, the Alessandro Albanese gallery in Milan and the company M.Z. Constructions. On this initiative is being prepared a printed volume edited by Giorgio Verzotti and realized with the support of EMMEGI Group always close to the instances of contemporary art.