Pietro Pizzi Cannella : Echoes of a City
by Maya Binkin

In his 2014 essay In Praise of Painting, written for Pizzi Cannella’s solo exhibition in Singapore, Danilo Eccher observed, “For Pizzi Cannella, working on serial iconographies is primarily a conceptual process. It involves a constant reformulation of an idea that alludes to the familiarity of the language but that actually explores its endless mutations.”[1] A decade on, it becomes clear that what once appeared as a disciplined serial practice has deepened into something far more visceral: an artistic obsession driven not by repetition for its own sake, but by a metaphysical pursuit of meaning.

This exhibition, presenting works formed over roughly ten years, reflects a career that began in the 1970s with the formation of the Scuola di San Lorenzo in Rome’s working-class outskirts, and which has since spanned six decades and countless exhibitions.

Cannella’s paintings present chosen objects: dresses, fans, necklaces, chairs, amphorae, and chandeliers, suspended against a void-like grounds. These items, recurring throughout his oeuvre and again in this exhibition, take on a symbolic quality. A more exhaustive inventory of these motifs can be found in his own text I Confess!, published in the same 2014 catalogue. Yet the works on display here aptly capture the motifs that have most intrigued the artist, objects repeatedly revisited over the decades, explored and transformed across shifting tonal and chromatic landscapes. While Eccher described Cannella’s process as serial, time has revealed it to be far less mechanical. His search is not mathematical but mystical.

The Scuola di San Lorenzo formed in the early 1980s, not as a defined movement with a strict manifesto but as a spontaneous coming-together of artists with shared ideals. They established themselves in the former Pastificio Cerere, an abandoned pasta factory turned studio complex in the 1970s. Reacting against the commodification and hyper-conceptualisation of art, the group consisting of Bruno Ceccobelli, Gianni Dessì, Giuseppe Gallo, Nunzio, Pizzi Cannella, and Marco Tirelli, reasserted the value of aesthetic and craftsmanship. They sought not the cult of the individual but a deeper, universal connection. Their focus was on experimenting with materials and techniques while remaining grounded in formal inquiry.

Cannella is a Roman artist. Apart for a brief sojourn in New York in the mid-1980s where he encountered several contemporaries including Andy Warhol, arguably the high priest of consumerist art, he remained tethered to Rome. Rome adds a compelling dimension to his practice. It lends his chosen objects an aura of the eternal. They transcend decoration or motif, becoming vessels of memory, ritual, and reverie. When asked about the consistent nature of Rome in his work, Cannella paused, eyes half closed, and replied: “Rome is an idea. It is not a place.”[2]

It seems apt, therefore, to consider Cannella’s works through one of Rome’s most enduring writers, whose work has rippled through time: Ovid, and his Metamorphoses. What tale better speaks to the dual themes of repetition and obsession than that of Echo and Narcissus? The nymph Echo, punished by Juno to repeat the last few words spoken to her, falls in love with Narcissus when she sets eyes on him in the woods during a deer hunt. It was her repetitiveness that made him cruelly spurn her, casting her away in annoyance. Consumed with love, plunging into obsession she fades away until nought is left of physical form. All that remains is her echoing voice. In turn, for his cruelty, Narcissus is made to discover his own reflection and finds himself unable to turn his gaze away from the face that greets him. So consumed is he with his beauty that he too wastes away and dies on the riverbank, his body transforming into a delicate white flower with a yellow centre.

It is a cautionary tale about the blurred line between love and obsession, and the tragic dissolution of the self. Its power lies in the eventual disappearance of the lovers, each metamorphosed by desire. In Cannella’s work, a similar absence dominates. His dresses are suspended in space, empty of figure; fans and necklaces float as if held aloft by invisible hands. The human form is gone, yet its trace remains. The tale of Echo and Narcissus, where obsession erases form and leaves only trace—a voice, a reflection—mirrors Cannella’s world of ghostly objects. His fans, chandeliers, and dresses are like Echo’s fading voice: echoes of human presence, forever suspended, ungraspable.

Though rendered against monochromatic voids, Cannella’s grounds are anything but empty. They are rich with texture and memory, drips of paint, brushwork gestures, and atmospheric layers that recall the white grime-streaked walls of Rome or the black mouth of a cave. Light and darkness interact not to illuminate, but to haunt. The objects are suspended in a nothingness full of the stuff of artists.

This interplay of light and dark is particularly evident in Cannella’s chandelier paintings. Executed in remarkable detail and beauty, they emit a light from within. Yet they fail to light the space in which they inhabit creating an eerie atmosphere. Even in the version presented in this exhibition titled Salone de musique, 2024 where the ground has been left raw, the chandelier’s light seems unable to radiate beyond its space, visible yet inert, unable to reach beyond its confines.

The notable exception in this exhibition is Corallo, 2025, featuring a suspended dress with a red impasto spot where the heart would be. Like a bullet wound or a punctured heart, the red marks draw the eye. Its gesture violent, raw, and deeply intentional. Among a body of work marked by muted tones and restraint, this act of chromatic aggression recalls J.M.W. Turner’s infamous intervention during the Summer Exhibition of 1832. The story goes that when Turner saw his cool-toned seascape Helvoetsluys hung next to Constable’s scarlet-flecked Thames scene The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, he was piqued by the prospect of being upstaged. So in a retaliatory move, he planted a single daub of red in the sea of his own canvas, later finessing it to look like a buoy bobbing in the choppy seas. When Constable saw what Turner had done, he declared: “He has been here and fired a gun.”[3]

So too, Cannella fires a gun. The red mark breaks the spell of subtlety, asserting itself with a sharp finality. It punctuates the exhibition, setting this work apart from the other dress paintings. Cannella uses the red hue in Corallo, 2009, Melograno 2024-2025, and as the ground in Ombra Cinese, 2025 but to different effect. Corallo, 2025 reminds us that behind the ghostly poetry of his practice lies something pulsing—something wounded, even vengeful. In this, Cannella’s painting becomes not just an echo, but a voice: urgent, haunting, unforgettable.

In 1984, the factory-turned-studio where Pizzi Cannella still works today was opened to the public in a landmark exhibition titled Ateliers, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. It marked a historic moment for contemporary art in Rome. Rather than bringing artworks into the sanitized environment of the museum or gallery, Ateliers reversed the dynamic: the public was invited into the private, intimate realm of the artist’s studio. It was a radical gesture for the time that offered direct access to the space where creation happened, with all its messiness and experimentation.

The studios became a locus for cultural exchange and debate. Artists, intellectuals, critics, and poets gathered there, drawn to the spirit of inquiry and collaboration. Over time, the site developed into a lasting hub of creativity. Today, the building continues to host artist studios, fashion ateliers, graphic designers, and RUFA (Rome University of Fine Arts), keeping alive its legacy as a vital engine of artistic life in the city.

Ateliers brought visibility and acclaim to the artists of the Scuola di San Lorenzo, securing their place in Italian art history. While Cannella’s practice is steeped in tradition, he is unmistakably a modern artist. His work draws on key visual strategies of the great 20th century makers: the flattening of form pioneered by Matisse, the expansive colour fields of the Abstract Expressionists, Francis Bacon’s emotive isolation and symbolic suspension of singular objects, or the blank grounds reminiscent of Joan Miró. Yet Cannella fuses these influences into a wholly personal language that is distinctly his own.

Cannella’s language includes one of his most enduring and enigmatic symbols: the amphora. The amphora appears early in Cannella’s work and remains a recurring motif across the six decades. It evokes the grandeur of the Roman Empire, and a deep lineage rooted in Mediterranean history. More than a vessel to transport wine, grain, or oil, the amphora was also a prize, a ritual object symbolising kinship and a connection to the Gods.

The amphora also has resonance in modernity. In Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, actors are confined within urns, stripped of agency and mobility. Beckett uses the amphora as a symbol of decay and containment in his seminal theatre of the absurd. And so with Cannella’s amphora: are they tokens of devotion, an echo of a glorious history or do they speak to the futility of separating ourselves from the past, particularly in a city like Rome, where history looms immovable?

Perhaps they are both. The beauty of Cannella’s work lies in its tensions—in the coexistence of reverence and memory with a critique in decay. The amphora, repeated across his career, resists simple interpretation. It is at once personal and universal, celebratory and elegiac. This same ambivalence permeates his cityscapes as in Veduta, 2022 and Veduta, 2004-2005. His domed horizons, imagined buildings, and shadowed facades, while evocative of sacred architecture, are entirely fictive. Cannello explains that though they resemble religious buildings, these echo his beliefs and are entirely faithless. As Italo Calvino wrote “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”[4]

Finally, we turn to Cannella’s extraordinary zodiac paintings Zodiaco (2024–2025) and Zodiaco Inverso (2021–2022). Though celestial motifs appear throughout his oeuvre such as in Lei di luna calante and Lei di luna crescente (both 2015), where he taps into a feminine lunar force, these zodiac works suggest something more cosmic. Cannella creates a kind of heavenly calendar, invoking not just constellations, but an older myth of universal order and origin. His search for meaning, memory, and the universal remains ever restless. As Leonardo da Vinci is said to have remarked “a work of art is never finished, only abandoned.”[5] Cannella’s art, too, resists closure. It remains suspended—unfinished, unresolved, alive.

[1] Eccher, Danilo. Pizzi Cannella, Carlo Cambi Editore, Singapore, 2014, p.7

[2] Cannella, Pizzi, interviewed by Binkin, Maya, Rome 16 April, 2025

[3] Riding, Jacqualine. 1832 Shot out of the Water? Chronical250, Accessed 23 April 2025, https://chronicle250.com/1832

[4] Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities, Harvest Publications, USA, 1974, p.44

[5] As commonly attributed to De Vinci, Leonardo; see “Famous Leonardo da Vinci Quotes,” LeonardoDaVinci.net, accessed April 23, 2025, https://www.leonardodavinci.net/quotes.jsp.