The Lucca Film Festival, now in its 21st edition scheduled from September 20 to 28, 2025, confirms its vocation to explore the intersections between cinema and the visual arts. A line of research inaugurated in 2012 with the exhibition dedicated to David Lynch, which brought to Lucca photographs, lithographs and drawings by the recently deceased American director-artist. Since that year, the festival has built a path of dialogue between visual languages, hosting in subsequent years exhibitions by such central figures as David Cronenberg, Peter Greenaway, Marco Bellocchio, Mario Monicelli, Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti.
For the 2025 edition, the focus is on Giuseppe Veneziano (Mazzarino, 1971), one of the leading figures of the Italian contemporary scene, a leading exponent of the New Pop movement and the Italian Newbrow group. To him the festival dedicates the Art Fiction exhibition, hosted in the rooms of Palazzo Guinigi, in the historic heart of the city. The exhibition, curated by Alessandro Romanini, will be open from Sept. 10 to 28 and will be inaugurated on Wednesday, Sept. 10, at 6 p.m. The show brings together 20 recent paintings that bear witness to the stylistic signature of Veneziano, an artist who has made contamination his privileged language. Chronicle, art history, pop culture and cinema meet in his works, in an interweaving that returns compositions with an immediate impact, characterized by intense colors and shots that recall film grammar. For him, painting becomes a scene, a screen on which different elements merge in visual and narrative short-circuits. The title “Art Fiction” clarifies the intent: to put the artistic dimension in dialogue with the narrative one, reworking reality through forms capable of moving and making collective experiences comprehensible. Art and fiction, in Veneziano’s vision, respond to the same human need to narrate and reinterpret the world.
Prominent among the works on display is Mr. Wolf. Problem Solver, an acrylic on canvas that recalls the iconic character from Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction.” The reference to the famous film, however, becomes an opportunity for a broader discourse in which popular culture dialogues with the socioeconomic present. Veneziano transforms cinematic imagery into a critical lens on the contemporary.
Another painting, Lockdown, reflects on the pandemic period. Here chronicle and dystopia are intertwined, resulting in a suspended atmosphere reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s painting. Against this backdrop, the artist inserts references to the DC Comics world, particularly Batman and his antagonist Joker. The figure of the criminal clown, which has returned to the center of visual culture thanks to the films starring Joaquin Phoenix and the recent television series starring Colin Farrell, becomes an emblem of disquiet and contradiction.
Joker also appears in another work that reinterprets Michelangelo’s Pieta. Veneziano mixes sacred and profane, tradition and popular culture, in a synthesis that confronts the artistic heritage of the past with the myths of contemporaneity. This is a recurring feature of his production: the juxtaposition of different languages and symbols to generate new readings and provoke reflection.
The exhibition itinerary invites the viewer to an exercise of recognition and decoding. Veneziano’s canvases are littered with quotations and references ranging from cinema to comics, from design to video games, from music to the Web. Each work is a mosaic of signs that are recomposed into a coherent visual narrative, orchestrated with precision and without randomness.
Curator Alessandro Romanini emphasizes how the Sicilian artist manages to embody the “dangerous relationships” between art and cinema in an original way. His works are based on a layered visual memory, supported by a solid art-historical and cinematic education. However, knowledge of languages does not prevent Veneziano from adopting a personal and immediately recognizable style, in which painting is always in dialogue with current events.
Giuseppe Veneziano has built an international career over the years. An architect by training, he soon chose to devote himself entirely to art. He has participated in numerous major events, from the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, hosted in the Italian Pavilion, to the Italy-China Biennale in 2012, the Prague Biennale in 2009 and the St. Petersburg Biennale in 2008, and the “Artâthlos” exhibition organized for the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
His works have been exhibited in venues such as the Milan Triennale, Museo Riso in Palermo, MART in Rovereto, Museo Civico in Trento, Musei Capitolini in Rome, Museo Pecci in Prato, Palazzo Ducale in Massa, Palazzo Pallavicini in Bologna, and the Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai. He has also had numerous exhibitions in Italian and international galleries, from London to Munich, from New York to other European capitals.
His painting, characterized by iconographic mash-ups that combine historical figures, news personalities, movie stars and pop icons, is distinguished by an ironic and at the same time critical language, capable of reflecting on contemporary society(here an in-depth article by Federica Schneck). The visual impact is immediate, but behind the bright colors and dynamic compositions lies a constant reflection on the present and the mythologies that run through it.
With Art Fiction, the Lucca Film Festival confirms its vocation to go beyond the boundaries of cinema to explore the visual arts. The dialogue between screen and canvas, between film sequences and painting, becomes the center of an exhibition that invites reflection on the permeability of languages. Veneziano interprets cinema as an archive of shared images, capable of merging with other narratives to build a collective imagination.
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| Giuseppe Veneziano on display at Lucca Film Festival 2025 with Art Fiction |
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