Trained in his youth in Ascoli Piceno, where he was born in 1936, Tullio Pericoli has been Milanese by adoption since 1961. The artist is a guest with the exhibition “Fragments” in the rooms of the Appartamento dei Principi at Palazzo Reale in Milan, until 9 January.
Known for having illustrated the stories of a long series of famous writers, over the years he has also ironically portrayed many personalities of authors such as Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Samuel Beckett, Beppe Fenoglio, Primo Levi and Italo Calvino , but also figures from the publishing world such as Carlo Caracciolo.
His passion for the theater should not be forgotten. In 1995 he designed sets and costumes for Donizetti’s opera L’elisir d’amore staged in Zurich. Three years later, he curates a new staging of the same work for La Scala in Milan. In 2001 he directed, sets and costumes for Ionesco’s Chairs for the Teatro Studio in Milan and in 2002 he designed sets and costumes for Gioacchino Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia for the Zurich Opera House.
Dangers, Franz Kafka, 1918
The large monograph, edited by Michele Bonuomo, over 150 works created from 1977 to 2021, unfolds in the ten rooms on the first floor of the Palazzo, favoring the ever-recurring theme of the landscape, whose living matter is painted in fragments. Which contain balances within the fibers of color.
The landscape as an expression of the different moods, the landscape of the territories of the Marche, to which he has always paid particular attention. But also the imagined and dreamed landscape: rows, hills, trees, plows, profiles of fields… they resurface in the memory, broken up, fragmented precisely.
Canvases in which the horizon is often not grasped, paintings of uninterrupted silence, thanks to the total absence of human images: the figures who plowed those fields, planted those trees, furrowed those hills have disappeared. But the slopes, steep or flat, are divided into many pieces that tell what it was, that we do not see but speak of farmers, peasants …
Dangers, Combinations
Works scratched, on the pasty texture of color, by Pericoli not only by painter’s brushes, but also by spatulas, turner’s brushes, engraver’s tools.
“I paint landscapes because they open up to me and include me, giving me the pleasure of abandoning myself to their destiny… I don’t paint landscapes to make landscapes. I paint them for the pleasure of painting. And to do one painting after another ”says the artist.
The last room presents some portraits: a selection of watercolors and oils. Faces, characters and souls of protagonists of literature studied, studied and interpreted by his eye and brush.
Tullio Danger. Fragment
October 13, 2021 – January 9, 2022
Royal Palace – Piazza del Duomo 12 – Milan
Hours: Tuesday / Sunday from 10:00 to 19:30, Thursday until 22:30 – closed on Mondays
Tickets: Full € 6 – Reduced € 4
www.palazzorealemilano.it
Dangers, Combinations