Francesco Lauretta was born in Ispica, in 1964, and after spending some years in Turin he arrived in Florence, where he currently resides and has his studio. He is a multifaceted artist who declines figurative painting with installations, sculpture and the most heterogeneous materials. The magazine has covered him on various occasions, dedicating a cover to him and organizing an exhibition for him back in 2005: “Tenetevi svegli!”. Now, on the occasion of his exhibition at Giovanni Bonelli, we met with the author to explore together with him the contents of this new adventure.
Partial view of the exhibition “Parade” by Francesco Lauretta at Galleria Giovanni Bonelli in Milan. Ph Francesca Liantonio
Francesca Liantonio: Parade is a title that carries with it a long lineage, from Seurat to Cocteau. So, what kind of “parade” do you imagine for your exhibition?
Francesco Lauretta: My Parade is not a celebratory parade, nor a spectacular event in the classical sense. It is rather an unstable procession, made up of images that advance without triumph, an irony of symbols that no longer bear the weight of their history. I was interested in developing a parade that was also a parody: a fragile, ironic, and misaligned procession, a deviant song, a departure, a variation on something we know all too well. This exhibition stages a narrative that does not proceed linearly but through successive apparitions, as happens in rituals or dreams, a narrative where movement does not lead to a destination but insists on a circular repetition. Painting is never autonomous, never alone: it engages with space, with the movement of the body, with the time of crossing. The gallery becomes a stage, and painting expands into the environment, taking the form of a narrative. In this sense, Parade is a staging of painting as an expanded experience, where what matters is not the image itself, but its ability to trigger a sequence of perceptual and symbolic shifts.
Francesco Lauretta, “Bubblegum”, 2025, oil on canvas, 193 x 255 cm. Ph courtesy Galleria Giovanni Bonelli
The first performance of Cocteau’s Parade took place in Paris at the Théâtre du Châtelet on May 18, 1917, at a time marked by the flames of the First World War. Likewise, your exhibition today is taking place at a complex historical moment: how important is the context in which an exhibition takes shape for you?
The context in which an exhibition takes shape is always crucial for me, even when it isn’t openly stated. The Parade being created today exists in a time marked by crisis and instability, in a complex, fragile historical moment rife with tensions not so distant from those of 1917. I don’t believe in temporal coincidences as a neutral fact: every parade, every collective performance, carries with it the weight of the time in which it occurs. A silent pressure that shapes the artistic gesture. What interests me most about that idea of a parade is its ambiguity. On the one hand, it is a celebration, a game, a spectacle; on the other, it’s discipline, power, violent exposure. It’s a collective event that can easily become propaganda. Its apparent “plotlessness” is actually what makes it dangerous and fascinating: a sequence of images that doesn’t explain, but insists. A seemingly innocent nature, yet charged with tension. In this way Parade becomes a form of suspension, a device that brings together irony and anxiety, lightness and unease. It doesn’t celebrate, but rather exposes our being “on the edge”, within a story that seems to repeat itself without ever being resolved. A suspended dimension, in which the performative and the collective coexist with a sense of emptiness, precariousness, and pervasive instability.
Francesco Lauretta, “Parade 1”, 2025, ink on paper gold pigment, 29.5 x 20 cm. Ph courtesy Galleria Giovanni Bonelli
In this exhibition, names written on the walls appear – writers, artists, musicians – that you define as “intercessors”: silent presences that “press” on your personality. Gilles Deleuze said that without “intercessors there is no work: he speaks of them as a necessary condition of creation. How do you recognize your intercessors? What role do these presences play in your daily practice: are they suggestions, alliances, or actual forces that influence your work?
I recognize my intercessors over time, not by strategic choice but by vital necessity. They are figures who accompany me daily, who have helped shape my way of thinking, breathing, and being in the world. I don’t consider them influences in the traditional sense, but active presences, forces that act within and make my work possible.
Francesco Lauretta, “Famiglia”, 2025, oil on canvas, 195 x 280 cm. Ph courtesy Galleria Giovanni Bonelli
Horses are the visual heart of Parade, running through it from beginning to end: they evoke dance, children’s play, power, and memory. They appear like suspended puppets, witnesses to a closed historical cycle. What kind of figures are they in your artistic practice: symbols, parodies, ghosts? Do they evoke a melancholic or liberating image? Is there perhaps a connection between these suspended horses and our contemporary living conditions?
The horses that cross Parade are not stable symbols, nor heroic icons. They are figures in crisis, ghosts of painting and history. For centuries, the horse has been man’s companion, an instrument of conquest, power, and domination. Today, that function has decayed, and it is precisely this decay that interests me. My horses are fragile, suspended, sometimes ridiculous. They lose their arrogance and become almost folkloristic objects, puppets, remnants. This is why, ultimately, my horse has transformed into a docile donkey, festively decorated. There is an evident melancholy in this transformation, but also a liberating possibility: the horse’s fall coincides with the crisis of a violent and patriarchal imagination. Ultimately, these horses speak to our contemporary condition: domesticated, fragile, suspended between nostalgia and the need for change.
Francesco Lauretta, “Parade”, 2025, oil on canvas, 192 x 228 cm. Ph courtesy Galleria Giovanni Bonelli
The exhibition is structured around an empty space and a circular motion, a path that can always be repeated. How important is the visitor’s body and their physical experience of the space to you? Bright curtains open the view onto small red drawings, a playful curtain that opens. What happens when you “walk through” the work?
The visitor’s body is fundamental to me. I never think of a work as something to simply look at: I’m interested in what happens when you walk through the space, when your body engages with distances, with emptiness, with the repetition of the path. The shimmering curtains function as a playful curtain, but also as a threshold. Crossing them means accepting entry into another dimension, where painting doesn’t offer itself immediately, but demands time, attention, and openness. When you cross and try to enter the work, nothing spectacular happens: something subtle. A perceptual shift, an invisible tension that slowly settles. Painting, here, is not an object but a field of experience. Different for each of us.
Francesco Lauretta, “Supreme”, 2025, oil on canvas, 202 x 277 cm. Ph courtesy Galleria Giovanni Bonelli
You talk about “impact” as a moment in which perception, sense, and movement collide. Is the impact, then, a physical and perceptual movement that also transforms into an emotional moment?
When I speak of impact, I’m referring to a moment in which perception, movement, and sense finally collide. It’s not physical violence, but an internal friction, something that doesn’t immediately return. The impact is precisely this: a point of instability that opens, rather than closes.
If Parade were a threshold rather than a landing place, not a point of arrival but a departure, what feeling would you like the audience to take away?
Parade is not a point of arrival but a fragile departure. I’d like the audience to leave the exhibition with an ambiguous feeling: something light, perhaps fun, but at the same time disturbing.
Francesca Liantonio
Info:
Francesco Lauretta, Parade
Galleria Giovanni Bonelli
via L. P. Lambertenghi 6, Milano
29.01.2026 – 28.02.2026
Tuesday – Saturday 11.00 – 19.00
+39 02 87246945
info@galleriagiovannibonelli.it
www.galleriagiovannibonelli.it
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