At the Paolo Antonacci gallery in Rome, the solo exhibition of Paolo La Motta

At the Galleria Paolo Antonacci gallery in Rome, from June 3 to June 20, 2026, the solo exhibition Silenzi parlanti by Paolo La Motta, a Neapolitan artist with ties to the Rione Sanità (Naples), where he lives and works, is on view. The exhibition project consists of thirty oil on canvas paintings that restore a figurative language rooted between the 19th and 20th centuries, reinterpreted in a contemporary key.

The work presented is located within a research that interweaves references to the European pictorial tradition and an interpretation of everyday urban reality. The works insist on domestic subjects, interiors and architectural foreshortenings, building a visual framework in which light and shadow assume a structural role in defining the images.

In the critical text linked to the exhibition, Sylvain Bellenger, former director for eight years of the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte and curator of a solo exhibition of the artist’s work in 2021, identifies in La Motta’s painting a constellation of references that crosses different figurative traditions. These include Thomas Jones, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas, read as elements of a visual genealogy that also includes the tradition of landscape and the representation of space.

"This historical dimension is the ideal peculiarity of the Paolo Antonacci Gallery, which by family tradition has always been devoted to ancient art, in particular to that Roman and Neapolitan neoclassicism that, after the Renaissance, made the past a vanguard for all of Europe, brought by Grand Tour travelers and English amateurs. The encounter between La Motta and Antonacci was written in advance and today it only comes to fruition through this exhibition," Bellenger writes in the introduction to the show.

The practice of La Motta, a painter and sculptor, is described as closely connected to everyday experience. Observation of the neighborhood, architectural surfaces and light conditions is the starting point of the artistic process. Windows, balconies in a state of decay and Baroque doorways deprived of their original decorative elements become recurring iconographic nuclei, through which the city is configured as an identifying and structuring element.

According to the reading proposed by Bellenger, the artist’s painting restores the dimension of a poetic and anxious gravity of simple things, in which portraits, landscapes and interiors are placed in a space of tension between everyday dimensions and metaphysical setting. This approach fits into a framework of contemporary Italian painting, in which the representation of reality maintains a direct relationship with the figurative tradition while taking on current declinations.

At the Paolo Antonacci gallery in Rome, the solo exhibition of Paolo La Motta

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