A work characterized by the use of the pictorial instrument such as that of Gianni Pedullà finds its framing in the current season, within which it is able to offer a contribution of not negligible originality.
The works of Pedullà are characterized by a fantasy charge that directs the composition toward surprising and never-hoped outcomes.
The artist pursues what can be interpreted, for about thirty years, to be precise from the second half of the 1980s, after the post-conceptual wave of the return to painting, with the presence of currents such as “Transavanguardia, Nuovi Nuovi, Anacronismo”, as a sort of redefinition of the genres of pictorial language.
Being a ductile instrument of excellence, open to an inexhaustible number of applications and able to best support the artist's sensibility and intuition, allows painting to renew its iconography and function. From his ancient vocation to the mimic representation of natural reality, painting has been able to change his style recently, narrating with great poetic and evocative capacity, the anxieties of a rapidly changing world, characterized by the fetish obsession for objects and consumer goods, in search of certainties and of great narratives that have come to an end and are replaced by an incessant incident of simulacrums of all sorts.
Gianni Pedullà has profoundly braided his life and career with the artistic events of a city emblematic such as Bologna; Calabrian with a strong bond with his place of origin, Pedullà moved to the capital of Emilia where, since the early eighties, he distinguished himself as one of the protagonists of the artistic scene.
In that decade, Bologna still lived the last significant reverberations of its best season, when it became the cultural avant-garde in Italy, becoming, thanks to the University, the main point of reference for youth creativity. From the next decade, and precisely since the beginning of year 2000, the artistic panorama in the city suffers, as a result of wrong choices from the public and private point of view, a crisis in some respects even deeper than the one that affected the Italian art system as a whole, victim of sectarian and opportunistic choices, and unable to impose itself abroad.
Pedullà, who boasts collaborations, among others, with historical galleries such as the “Cristofori Studies”, is part of a group of artists gathered around an alternative network like the “Campo delle Fragole”, which holds the rudder bar straight, pursuing with consistency project where the dimension of life and art are closely coinciding.
This behavior is being highlighted in the artistic production of Pedullà which is pictorial as a matrix, though painting often tends to expand outside the two-dimensional beam to give color to sculptural forms made of poor materials such as paper-mache, concretizing a fantastical and ludic zoomorphic imaginary.
Animals that substitute the man in a narration, the one of Pedullà, strongly symbolic, that succeeds, as it should normally be, to talk about the present without flattening on reality, adopting a simple style, but at the same time extremely refined and attentive to decorative values.
With a fast and synthetic style, but secure and self-conscious, Pedullà makes effective visual trajectories where human faces, anatomical details, objects and animals harmoniously integrate with the original backdrop made of silk oil-painted silk and subsequently canvassed.
This exquisite and interesting solo exhibit at the Celeste Hall in Bologna, accounts the recent artist's production, which seems to cross an extremely creative stage.
"Scrambled" the title of the exhibition, is well suited to the volcanic personality of Gianni Pedullà, a creative and restless artist, who is able to carry this charge of inspiration into the composition by giving it balance and harmony.
Edoardo Di Mauro, October 2017