Grammelot belongs to those languages that precede grammar. Popularised by Dario Fo (1926–2016), Nobel Prize in Literature 1997, in his masterwork Mistero Buffo, it is a mixture of sounds, rhythms and gestures — drawn from the tradition of the giullari, the itinerant jester-acrobats of medieval Italy — that says everything without naming anything, without rules or dictionary, and yet communicates with immediate force. Luca Ceccherini’s painting works in the same way.
Grammelot brings together a body of new works in which Ceccherini summons the world of the giullari, the figures of the commedia dell’arte and the landscapes of his Tuscan childhood. Acrobats, fools, tightrope walkers, silhouettes risen from the popular imagination: these figures inhabit the canvas like archetypes — familiar yet unidentifiable, rooted in a deep time that spills over into the present.
Ceccherini trained as an actor before dedicating himself to painting, and this originary tension is legible in every work. His figures do not seek to illustrate: they occupy space with the physical presence of a performer, inhabiting the surface with the same density as the tree trunks and forest edges that surround them. As Fo drew on medieval popular narratives to restore the voice of those history had chosen to ignore, Ceccherini works with a silent collective memory — not to preserve it as in a museum, but to give it back a pictorial life.
The exhibition is accompanied by text and curatorial collaboration by Giorgia Aprosio, art critic and curator.
