Viral Impurity - Fake Inner | Francesco Lauretta 2023

The title alludes to that salvific impurity which has become viral, enabling the artist to represent contemporaneity in its manifold dimensions. His companions on this personal journey are illustrious masters with whom he establishes, in turn, an intimate and sustained dialogue, in pursuit of a form of authorship capable of viewing the present as a polyhedron of innumerable surfaces, in which each image condenses an infinite number of narratives into a single instant.
Idiota opens the exhibition with a solemn and tragic painting of extraordinary intensity, depicting the artist’s father lying in his coffin. The work draws upon the words Dostoevsky places in the mouth of the consumptive Ippolit, who, contemplating Holbein’s sublime Christ, asks whether the Master, had he been able to see his own image on the eve of his execution, would nevertheless have ascended the cross and died as he did. In Lauretta’s painting, however, death grants the father a serene and tender gaze, almost suggesting: if it had been possible to see him in such serenity during his lifetime, perhaps things might have been different. The brush caresses the body like an affectionate gaze, a gesture seemingly capable of alleviating the suffering that marked his consciousness throughout life.
In the Gallery’s main hall, the atmosphere shifts. The monumental silhouette of the artist hanging in Viral Fucking is counterbalanced by the playful vitality of the Ragazze al Pop: figures seated at tables or rendered directly on canvas, participating in that tragic everyday existence that never ceases to smile at us as we enact our rituals—rituals that themselves measure time, the ticking rhythm of life. These figures attain an eternal youth in the miraculous fountain painted by Cranach, a seminal reference for the Sicilian artist’s imagination.
On the upper floor, a sequence of large-scale canvases addresses two recurring subjects: bathers and rituals. Each is conceived as a work a più mani—literally, “by several hands”—in which the artist’s illustrious companions appear to gather at his habitual haunts, at the counters of Le Nuvole or Pop Caffè. Courbet, Matisse, and Pirandello become co-authors of paintings depicting the cyclical temporality of a procession (L’ordine della festa), the monumental face of a bather (La Grande Bagnante), the barmaid serving colours and signs (Le Nuvole), and the companions of the now renowned Scuola di Santa Rosa (La Spezia). Together, these works form a succession of intense emotional registers that only the extraordinary diversity of Lauretta’s painting can encompass.
It is here that the visitor becomes conscious of the unsettling presence of the body of painting, hanging from the main structural beam. It seems poised to come back to life, generating new flavours and fragrances, becoming something other than what it once was and responding to a contemporaneity in which nothing is more truthful than fiction and nothing more viral than a form of writing capable of observing the world from both sides. In Lauretta’s work, it is the magic of language that makes such transformations possible, conferring upon uncertainty a necessary, enduring, and ultimately truthful condition.
The final station is Ragazza alla GAMEC. The image of a tiger in the arcade of the GAMEC in Bergamo crosses the digital space of photography before taking its place on the gallery wall. As the artist follows it while its guardian rests, the image shifts location and becomes a work elsewhere. The piece opens onto new directions in the artist’s research while reaffirming the vitality of painting: rather than succumbing to digital technologies, painting expands their possibilities, opening onto a virtual and hybrid conception of reality.
The exhibition thus unfolds through countless interwoven narratives that quietly occupy the gravitationally unbound space of the Tana, an intimate and secret place in which the artist’s imagination confronts the anxieties of existence. Above, below, beside, behind, at the top and at the bottom, the works form a constellation of images and a larger, encompassing narrative. It is within this freedom that Lauretta’s style becomes unmistakable: the eyes, heart, and mind with which he observes the world are the same through which he paints it. Thus, from one work to the next, painting is continually reborn into renewed youth, opening new fields of meaning and, like a virus, continuing to spread.