5 JUNE – 19 OCTOBER 2025
VILLA MALPENSATA, SPAZIO CIELO
The seventh event in the ‘Global Aesthetics’ series opens to the public on 5 June, presenting the works of Mr. Savethewall (artistic name of Pierpaolo Perretta) in the Spazio Cielo of Villa Malpensata. The Italian artist presents 38 portraits of modern and contemporary artists and a self-portrait, all created with spray paint and stencils, a technique borrowed from street art and reinterpreted on canvas.
This is a research project by MUSEC, which, together with the artist, has conducted a careful reflection on the value of the portraits in the famous Giovani gallery. The title of the project, ELOGIA MMXXV, is an explicit reference to the Elogi di uomini illustri (Eulogies of Illustrious Men) written in Latin between 1546 and 1551 by Paolo Giovio, a great humanist famous for his gallery of over 400 portraits of philosophers, writers, artists and powerful figures of the time, collected in his villa on Lake Como. Pierpaolo Perretta has decided to pay homage to the 38 portraits in the Giovio art gallery preserved in the Civic Museums of Como by recreating a personal gallery of portraits of artists in 2025, chosen for their particular significance in the development of his own artistic identity.
The portraits play on allusion and dissimulation: artists such as Alighiero Boetti, Amedeo Modigliani, Lucio Fontana, Frida Kahlo and Niki de Saint-Phalle (to name but five) are black silhouettes on canvas, to which the addition of iconic elements from their work, graphic or figurative, attests to their identity while evoking other possible meanings.
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