The exhibition dedicated to the artist Tommaso Lisanti will be inaugurated in Matera at 7:00 pm on September 28th at the headquarters of the SoutHeritage Foundation, in Via S. Potito 7, Rioni Sassi, as part of the GENIUS LOCI calendar, aimed at rediscovering protagonists and events among the most significant in the artistic history of the territory.

With this exhibition project, the SoutHeritage Foundation reaffirms an aspect of its cultural work based on the care of the relationship with the territory's heritage as an act of contemporary culture. Within the program called GENIUS LOCI - aimed at rediscovering some of the most innovative cultural episodes originating in the regional context and/or bringing to the attention of sector operators and the public historical artists active in Basilicata - the foundation presents an exhibition project that opens up the creative universe of an artist who, thanks to the peculiarity of his style and his research, has captured the attention of the public and critics in the national and international artistic panorama.

In this project, which reflects on the creative territory of Basilicata as a "terroir" generating particular aesthetics, following the previous focuses on the artistic research of personalities such as: Francesco Marino di Teana, Gerardo Cosenza, Donato Linzalata, Antonio Paradiso, Riccardo Dalisi, Salvatore Sebaste, and Franco Di Pede, within the framework of the current headquarters of the foundation, located in a container of high artistic and architectural value in the heart of the Rioni Sassi of Matera (Palazzo Viceconte - formerly Venusio), the exhibition presents a selection of works by the artist Tommaso Lisanti (Ferrandina - MT, 1956 > Rome, 2023) in which figuration and abstraction coexist in suggestive futuristic representations.

The exhibition, which pays tribute with renewed attention to this extraordinary protagonist of Italian painting who has always had a particular inclination towards avant-garde and space-time conceptions developed in the field of visual arts in the first half of the twentieth century, features 20 works that explore new worlds and stimulate the mechanisms of the absurd. Through a careful selection of representative works, crossed by unknown characters or inhabitants of distant galaxies that manifest themselves to the viewer as a coded representation of an enigma, the exhibition project aims to highlight the artist's choice to use a "primitive" visual system (more suitable for describing a different and alternative reality) in which his attention to authors such as Giotto, the Flemish painters of the fifteenth century, and especially to painters more attentive to the recovery, even conceptual, of tradition and to quotations from the great repertoire of art history is recurrent.

Starting from the paradigm that science is a fundamental axis of our daily life but that the imaginary it produces is rather unexplored, the exhibition proposes the figure of an innovative artist who has anticipated a new relationship between science fiction and visual arts, a precursor of a "line," of a trend, which sees in the cinematographic and literary genre of science fiction a precise reference model. Lisanti was in fact one of the first artists to enter into a direct and declared dialogue with science fiction, using iconographies from cinema, illustration, and comics, to which the artist has been able to infuse a different life, creating ex novo his own pictorial world and building, with an almost mediumistic quality, images that seem transmitted from other galaxies, anticipating in turn, with his architectures, his aliens, and his landscapes of unknown planets, many figurative solutions of contemporary films and cartoons.

Thanks to the dramaturgy of the exhibition and the setup that fuels a reading path in which the works reflect each other, visitors, with the foundation's mediation program called "The (D)istances of the Public," will be able to enjoy a thorough comparative view in specific spaces interspersed with activities aimed at the public where they can rediscover the work of one of the greatest visionary Italian artists of recent decades.