In the heart of Pietrasanta (LU), Franco Sansone’s Penta Art Gallery offers collectors and enthusiasts an immersive experience in the landscape of Italian painting and sculpture. The works proposed by the gallery range from Abstractionism to Realism and Surrealism, offering a vast panorama of 20th-century artistic movements with a focus on internationally renowned masters, including Piero Dorazio, Roberto Sebastian Matta and Renato Guttuso. At the same time, it aims to rediscover and promote quality artists less present on the market, such as Giovanni Omiccioli, Luigi Montanarini, Domenico Purificato, Antonio Vangelli and Remo Brindisi. Works by 20th-century artists belonging to Forma 1 (Piero Dorazio, Achille Perilli, Giulio Turcato), the Roman School (Giovanni Omiccioli, Domenico Purificato, Carlo Levi), as well as Realism (Renato Guttuso, Alberto Sughi), dialogue with contemporary artists increasingly appreciated by the international market (such as Giorgio Griffa, Piero Gilardi and Marcello Lo Giudice).
Installation of Penta Art Gallery stand with works by Piero Gilardi, Luciano Ventrone, and Matta, courtesy Penta Art Gallery, Pietrasanta (LU)
For Arte Padova (scheduled from November 14 to 17, 2025), Penta Art Gallery has selected works by great artists linked to Venice and the Veneto region, such as Virgilio Guidi, Bruno Saetti, Remo Brindisi and Riccardo Licata, together with internationally renowned masters, including Pablo Picasso, Matta, Piero Dorazio and Luciano Ventrone, and contemporary artists (Alessandro Tofanelli and Tania Naumchik). The booth, no. 92 Pavilion 7 of the fair, will be completed with sculptures by Annarosa Romano and Paolo Monterisi (R&M). The artistic duo, based in Milan and Treviso, works with a plurality of media, such as painting, drawing, sculpture and installation, combining contemporary and traditional techniques. Their works are present in prestigious venues such as MoMA PS1 and included in the permanent collections of the Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin, the Museum of Decorative Arts at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and the Musée du Verre in Charleroi. In the field of applied arts and design, the artists investigate the relationship between photography and video installation, and in 2015 they won the Red Dot Design Award in London with “Fylo”; their recent works include large-format photographic portraits with deep psychological significance. After the recent exhibition Je Parle Aux Murs at Villa Brandolini d’Adda, Solighetto (TV), a tribute to Le Corbusier, R&M presents here Elettra and Atlante (2022), a pair of large-scale ceramic heads in which the reference to Greek mythology merges with suggestions drawn from Philip Roth‘s novel The Human Stain.
R&M (Annarosa Romano and Paolo Monterisi), “Elettra” and “Atlante”, 2022, ceramics, coiling technique with certified platinum glaze, courtesy the artists and Penta Art Gallery, Pietrasanta (LU)
The two sculptures, 115 and 105 centimeters tall respectively, emerge as enigmatic and solemn presences, silent witnesses to a narrative that interweaves literature, identity, and memory. Created using the traditional coiling technique – a manual construction method that involves overlaying coils of clay – the works are the result of a lengthy artisanal process involving specialized ceramicists. The certified platinum glaze finish gives the surfaces a cold and precious luminosity, lending the material an ethereal and quintessential connotation. The project from which these sculptures arise is part of the research strand that characterizes R&M’s work: the visual translation of complex literary narratives. The Human Stain, a novel published in 2000 and set during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, tells the story of Coleman Silk, a classics professor forced to resign after a controversial episode. The protagonist, who has lived his entire life concealing his African American origins by passing as white, dies tragically together with his lover Faunia Farley. In the funeral chapter, Roth reveals Silk’s true identity through the presence of his mother and sister, both Black.
R&M (Annarosa Romano and Paolo Monterisi), “Elettra”, 2022, ceramics, coiling technique with certified platinum glaze, courtesy the artists and Penta Art Gallery, Pietrasanta (LU)
R&M have built an entire installation around this narrative turning point, presented in 2023 at Villa Caldogno, a Palladian villa near Vicenza, where a three-meter-long corpse lay surrounded by ceramic heads. These sculptures functioned as witnesses and guardians, embodying the “spooks”- a term that in the novel assumes a double meaning, indicating both ghosts and, in a now-unacceptable derogatory sense, people of color. Elettra and Atlante, whose names refer to the Pleiades of Greek mythology, a subject Coleman Silk knew deeply, represent precisely these witnesses: figures who have witnessed the final revelation, custodians of a truth kept hidden for an entire existence. The choice of platinum glaze is not merely aesthetic. The precious material, which has a cost comparable to that of gold, elevates the sculptures to objects of secular worship, relics of a story of discrimination, shame, and tragedy. The shiny surface reflects the viewer, involving them in the narrative and confronting them with the theme of identity and the social masks we wear. The synthetic and elongated forms of the heads, hollow inside as required by the coiling technique, suggest a tension between presence and absence, between the fullness and emptiness of denied identity.
R&M (Annarosa Romano and Paolo Monterisi), “Maya”, 2023, black and white glazed ceramics, installation view at Villa Caldogno (VI), ph. courtesy the artists
R&M demonstrate once again how ceramics can become a vehicle for critical and social reflection. The duo does not merely pay homage to Philip Roth – of whom they declare themselves passionate admirers – but uses his narrative as a starting point for an investigation into the construction of identity and the mechanisms of exclusion still operating in contemporary society. The bitter irony that permeates the novel finds echo in the almost funereal solemnity of these sculptures, which transform individual trauma into a universal warning. The presence of Elettra and Atlante in Penta Art Gallery’s stand creates an unexpected bridge between the historical masters of the twentieth century and contemporary research, demonstrating how art can take on the complexity of the present without renouncing technical mastery and conceptual depth. In a historical moment when themes of identity and representation are at the center of cultural debate, these two ceramic heads stand as a memento of how high the cost of self-denial can be, and how only through the recognition of one’s own truth – however uncomfortable – is it possible to achieve an authentic form of freedom.
Info:
Actor and performer, he loves visual arts in all their manifestations.
NO COMMENT