In Questa Luce | Francesco Lauretta 2022
curated by Pietro Gaglianò

The exhibition brings together approximately one hundred paintings and drawings produced by Lauretta between 2002 and 2021, tracing a path through images, memories, rituals, and visions rooted in Sicily, the artist’s homeland.
"In questa luce" is, above all, a tribute to Sicily, yet one that deliberately avoids any stereotypical or folkloristic representation of the island. Lauretta’s Sicily is both a mental and an affective space, traversed by ritual, memory, religion, landscape, food, history, and the contradictions of everyday life. It is a land in which splendour and melancholy, beauty and transience coexist in a state of constant tension.
Light constitutes the exhibition’s underlying thread: an intense, absolute, and uncompromising Mediterranean light, capable not only of revealing everything but also of consuming it. The large painting devoted to the Sicilian cassata, positioned at the entrance to the exhibition and inspired by the display windows of Caffè Sicilia in Noto, functions as a kind of manifesto. The cake’s shimmering surface, emblematic of opulence, pleasure, and tradition, already contains the principle of its own dissolution: its splendour already bears within it the certainty of its demise.
Lauretta’s painting emerges from precisely this ambivalence. It is at once ancient and contemporary, popular and erudite, ironic and melancholic. His images do not simply depict a recognisable reality; rather, they transform it through a pictorial language capable of moving swiftly between registers, bringing the private and the collective, individual memory and shared imagination, into dialogue.
His paintings are populated by processions, groups of people, portraits, bathers, workers, celebrations, and scenes from everyday life. These seemingly familiar images acquire, through the painterly gesture, a suspended, almost timeless dimension. Sicily thus becomes not so much a subject as a condition of seeing: a place where ritual and everyday life, the sacred and the profane, pleasure and death coexist seamlessly.
Within the exhibition, works produced over the course of almost two decades enter into dialogue without adhering to a strict chronological sequence. Instead, the exhibition constructs a narrative through associations, echoes, and recurring motifs, in which each image appears to generate the next. Drawings, paintings, and installations contribute to a kind of collective narrative that conveys the complexity of Lauretta’s visual universe.
At its centre remains painting, understood by the artist not simply as a means of representation, but as a space of experience, memory, and transformation. His practice draws deeply upon the history of art without ever reducing it to passive quotation: images and languages of the past are continually revisited, distorted, and brought back into circulation.
In this sense, "In questa luce" portrays a Sicily that is both contemporary and ancestral, luminous and dark, at once tangible and imaginary. It is a Sicily that Lauretta knows from within and renders through a form of painting free from any documentary intent, yet profoundly rooted in lived reality.
The exhibition thus becomes a journey through the artist’s memory and imagination, as well as an inquiry into the relationship between light and shadow, splendour and dissolution, life and death. The same light that illuminates the images also exposes their fragility: a paradoxical condition that belongs as much to Sicily as to Francesco Lauretta’s painting.
Ultimately, "In questa luce" is also a reflection on painting itself—on its capacity to transform the everyday into narrative, memory into image, and reality into a perpetually unstable form. It is a painting that, precisely through its apparent immediacy, opens spaces of ambiguity, irony, and melancholy, returning to the contemporary world a sense of its complexity, in which nothing is ever entirely separable from its opposite.