From 1 October to 19 November 2023, with the collaboration of the City of Piacenza, Palazzo Farnese will host ĬMĀGO, the personal exhibition of Maurizio L'Altrella, one of the established names in the panorama of new Italian figuration. A project that arises from a contemporary dialogue of L'Altrella's painting with the ancient figuration of the paintings of the Pinacoteca dei Musei Civici of Palazzo Farnese, which boasts a collection of works from the 14th to the 19th century.

The one set up in the Palazzo Farnese headquarters - as the curator Alessandra Klimciuk reminds us - is an exhibition itinerary which, thanks to around thirty unpublished works, allows us to cross the dreamlike and visionary world of L'Altrella, taking a journey into its unconscious representation : the ĬMĀGO of the exhibition title, a term that has become commonly used in psychoanalysis which specifically identifies the way in which the subject perceives the other and constructs his perception of the external world.

On the main floor of the Civic Museums of Palazzo Farnese, L'Altrella exhibits three paintings in conversation and comparison, by theme and iconography, with some of the works that constitute the core of the Pinacoteca's collection: Inspired by God (2023) in dialogue with the painting by Camillo Boccaccino King David (1533); Bilqis, Queen of Sheba (2023), in which he reworks The Queen of Sheba by Pier Francesco Ferrante (1652); The recurring dream of Prospero (2023), in which, starting from a detail of the work by Pieter Molier known as the Tempest, Stormy Sea with Shipwreck (1675 - 1699), addresses the romantic theme of sea storms with the suggestion, however, of one of the most powerful and visionary cinematographic works of its cult director, The Last Tempest (Prospero's Books), directed by Peter Greenaway in 1991 and based on the theatrical text The Tempest by William Shakespeare, in which iconography is mixed with a theme more unconscious and profound, in which the storm is symbolically a test thanks to which those who go through it emerge purified and transformed.

The exhibition itinerary continues in the space of Palazzo Farnese dedicated to temporary exhibitions with a selection of works including the cycle of eleven paintings dedicated to the Sweet Mother, in which the classical iconography of the Madonna and Child, a traditional subject of Christian iconography, takes on from time to time an unconscious representation or image very different from the parental figure of the title. His construction of space equates painting with sculpture, with careful work first on light and then on flesh. His work is not about detail, it is a work in which, using the spatula, he reveals the iconoclastic drive of Contemporary figuration, which has its greatest master in Francis Bacon, and we find it in the paintings The King's Gaze, The Penitent and Inside Diego. Homage to Velasquez.

The works on display reveal complex compositions, in which the contemporary energy and intensity that distinguishes L'Altrella's figuration emerges.