On Friday 11 November the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art inaugurates the Ciriaco Campus exhibition, Landscape 51, in which the artist presents his latest works: large unpublished canvases, belonging to a series developed in the last year, dense surfaces and wrinkled, gray and black, worked directly with the hands, on which ash and debris accumulate, traces of a catastrophe that seems to have consumed every trace of biological life and human presence. As artifacts that have remained exposed to the elements for too long, or as charred traces of a fire that has dissolved all recognizable forms, the paintings by Ciriaco Campus materialize the condition of a terrestrial landscape by now uninhabitable, desert and sterile, perhaps the effect of an environmental catastrophe, perhaps of a nuclear war that annihilated mankind.

For Ciriaco Campus, art has always been a tool to investigate the contradictions of the contemporary world and at the same time to explore the ambivalent position of the artist, called to testify and participate in the events of his time. Hence, a multifaceted work that over the course of four decades has touched from time to time the limits and possibilities of multiple forms of expression, from painting to photography, from drawing to video, often appropriating images extracted from the incessant flow of media.

The exhibition catalog will be produced with a critical text by Stefano Chiodi. The exhibition is supported by the Beatrice Burati Anderson Gallery, Venice.