After the great success at Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo, Venice, the personal exhibition of the Pompeian artist NELLO PETRUCCI stops in Desio at the headquarters of the Giuseppe Scalvini Museum, in the evocative setting of Villa Tittoni, a "villa of delight" in Brianza which has recently become of great international visibility for having hosted the video of the new Måneskin single.

The exhibition, entitled PROFILES, curated by Chiara Canali and with a critical text by Luca Beatrice, is promoted by Contemply Art & Investiment, and will be visible from 4 to 26 March 2023, with opening on Saturday 4 March 2023 from 5pm.

Nello Petrucci is an author already known in the Italian and international art scene: street artist, painter, video and filmmaker, he has matured a complex experience that passes from painting to urban intervention, from sculpture to directorial work. He has exhibited at Palazzo Gravina in Naples, at the Central State Archives of Rome, at the Archaeological Park of the Pompeii excavations, at the American Embassy in Rome and in various galleries in Italy and in New York. He has received awards and recognition by making independent film projects. With his latest work: "The last whiskey with the mad hatter" (2020) he obtained the nomination for the "Globo d'Oro" for best short film.

At the Giuseppe Scalvini Museum of Villa Tittoni in Desio (directed by Cristiano Plicato) a selection of pictorial works in collage and décollages is on display which present an overlapping and stratification of fragments of posters and posters found on the street, as well as advertisements, posters and other signs of mass communication. This lively and electrifying background, like the lights and signs of the city of New York that Petrucci has chosen as his second elective city, constitutes the background against which the works dedicated to the profiles of the Star System follow one another: actors (from Marcello Mastroianni to Raffaele Viviani), directors (from Sergio Leone to Francis Ford Coppola), musicians (Tom Waits) through which Nello tells us about his fascination for cinema posters and his seduction towards the world of celluloid.

At the same time the pictorial collages and décollages are expressive devices for juxtaposing the repertoire of classicism with the visual bombardment of current events: they are the stone and bronze faces found in Pompeii and Herculaneum or found in archeology museums around the world, vestiges of a distant past in time but still present and alive.

Luca Beatrice writes in the catalog published by Silvana Editoriale: "In truth, I like to think that Nello's Profiles that make up the central nucleus of this exhibition are the current continuation of that pantheon of celebrities staged by Warhol in the pop years and sieved through the Street Art whose background is always a chipped city wall, covered with posters in pieces and tatters. Petrucci puts them in line: some come from the world of antiquity, which basically represents pop at its unconscious origins, a fact that distinguishes us from other visual civilizations, especially from America”.

Chiara Canali continues, “Both for the profiles recovered from classicism and for the subjects from the cinema, Nello Petrucci has deliberately identified and chosen the halftone technique precisely because of its characteristic of being 'low definition', opaque, discontinuous, composed of discrete units, between which interstices, empty spaces are visible, because by providing little visual information to the observer, it requires greater involvement, greater participation to complete what is only suggested by the mosaic pattern of the dots”.

This halftone procedure is taken to the extreme in the Street Art actions conceived by Petrucci for the urban context and created extemporaneously in various Italian cities and around the world, here re-proposed in exhibition form as Giclèe prints on Fine Art paper.

This is the case of the denunciation mural, created in Miami during Art Basel, in favor of Chico Forti, the Italian who has been unjustly imprisoned in the United States for twenty years and who should have returned to Italy some time ago. Or in the intervention dedicated to the NFT boom (Bit Vs NFT), made in Venice in 2021, in which Petrucci compares the new blockchain market to a Far West in which two gunslingers face to face to grab each other's crypto loot currency.

Numerous works of accusation and controversy against the atrocities of war and the absurdity of totalitarian regimes (Love Park, Tank Washing, Deliveries, Fight), from the drama of Afghan mothers who throw their children to the British soldiers over barbed wire, to incongruity of a Ukrainian soldier showing off a rifle in front of a girl lying in a park.

“An adventure, the one with Petrucci, which began several years ago, which has led us to grow and improve constantly. Starting from a foundation of hard work and solid values we have managed to achieve great goals, first of all The essence of lightness, the permanent mural at 3 World Trade Center in New York, measuring 15x3.5 m, created as part of the Masterpiece project in the sky promoted by tycoon Larry Silverstein. This was just the springboard for countless other successes, including the Over the Sky exhibition at the American Embassy in Rome and Pompeii and the Mysteries of Eternal Beauty, solo exhibition inside the Casa del Criptoportico, Pompeii Archaeological Park and again the various site-specific installations such as the spectacular sculpture entitled Trame which has become part of the prestigious permanent collection of Thetis Spa and again Margine, positioned in the scenario of Torre Fossa lo Papa”, declares Giovanni Boccia, CEO Contemply Art & Investment.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog of 144 pages and 100 color images, published in 2022 by Silvana Editoriale, with texts by Luca Beatrice, Giovanni Boccia, Chiara Canali, Luigi Giordano