PIERO PIZZI CANNELLA: ALMANACCO VI

This exhibition brings together works created over the past decade by Roman artist Piero Pizzi Cannella, whose career began in the 1970s with the formation of the Scuola di San Lorenzo. His art is rooted in the spirit of that collective, born in a repurposed pasta factory in Rome, where artists sought to reassert the value of aesthetic, material, and mystery in an era turning toward conceptualism. Cannella’s studio, still housed in that same historic space, remains a site of experimentation, filled with recurring images that feel both deeply personal and universally resonant.

Cannella’s works are immediately recognizable: dresses, chandeliers, fans, amphorae, and architectural silhouettes float against textured, void-like grounds. These are not props or symbols to decode, but echoes, haunting remnants of the human form and the spaces it once occupied. Through absorbed repetition and subtle variation, these motifs evolve across time, becoming vessels of memory, longing, and transformation. Cannella’s paintings speak to the tension between presence and absence, love and obsession, visibility and disappearance.

Though steeped in the visual language of modernism, Cannella’s work remains tethered to Rome: a city of layers, ruins, and ghosts. Whether through the ancient shape of the amphora or the imagined outline of a cathedral, his paintings offer no fixed meaning. They are instead an invitation to linger in mystery, to sit with silence, and to feel the pulse of history moving through paint. In his words, “Rome is an idea—it is not a place.” This exhibition invites us to enter that idea.