Ragazze al Pop | Francesco Lauretta 2022
curated by Antonio Grulli

His compositions represent scenes of everyday life, collective rituals that are cyclically renewed, proposed as if the real were placed in front of a camera lens to celebrate instants of its daily routine, with the awareness that already a mere moment later that instant is subject to new interpretations. The scene is as if immortalised in its random uniqueness, dictated by a desire to celebrate the real and its capacity to regenerate and reinvent itself in any age to come. Lauretta, with a timeless gaze, excludes taken-for-granted meanings that can be deduced from what was manifested a moment before.
All this is achieved with a style governed by a pictorial wisdom that forces him to confront the history of language without, however, revealing any dependence. An aspect of his poetics excluding the authorship that would sanction a univocal vision and a rhetorical and predictable reading.
The light-hearted hilarity of his Girls at Pop whose painted silhouettes, seated at tables or represented on canvas, participate in the daily tragedy which never ceases to smile at us when we celebrate our rituals, being themselves the time, the ticking clock of life. And they resurrect to eternal youth in that miraculous fountain skilfully painted by Cranach that so influenced the Sicilian artist’s thinking.