Hybrids and anthropomorphs in Alessandro Del Pero's new exhibition in Brunico

From June 29 to September 28, 2024, theEck Museum of Art in Bruneck/Brunico presents the solo exhibition of artist Alessandro Del Pero, entitled Ab umbra lumen, curated by Lisa Leoni and Alexandra Überbacher, which brings together about twenty large-format paintings created over the past ten years between New York and Italy. The exhibition is part of the museum’s annual thematic journey, which for 2024 aims to investigate the relationship between art and religion.

In the latest series of paintings that Del Pero is presenting to the public for the first time, the study of light and shadows invests hybrid anthropomorphic figures, headless and placed on plinths. That is, they are sculptures in which we recognize bodies of men and women assembled together and which, in turn, are grafted to animal parts. An enameled hand holding a cigarette next to the wings of a butterfly or an angel, as in the acrylic on canvas The Cl imb of 2022, an uncovered breast on the open jaws of a lion, a muscular bicep encircling the head of a deer, as in the canvas The Hunter, also of 2022: an osmotic dialogue, that is, in which the realism of a certain painting acts as a counterbalance to the impossibility of the subjects treated, resulting in a semantic hyperbole that is as lyrical as it is paradoxical. “Del Pero bewitches us with extreme and aestheticizing painting,” writes Veronica Santi, author of the text in the catalog, “but at the same time he puts before our eyes a metaphorical interpretation of our current condition, in which the need to belong to a group or to be recognized by one’s audience is often castrated. And, perhaps, the animalistic part of man remains, potentially, the most authentic and real.”

Del Pero’s practice, though with the inevitable evolutions over time, presents recurring subjects and themes dear to the history of art, such as portraits, self-portraits, still lifes and crucifixions, but always set in an enclosed place: a room that reflects intimately and deeply on the condition of contemporary man.

In such an inner investigation, the main instrument is light - and its opposite, shadow - which in their alternation are self-empowering, becoming the key to access the psychological dimension of existence. As the title of the exhibition, Ab umbra lumen (“From the shadow comes the light”), suggests, it is therefore the explicit study of light that is the real subject of each work, beyond the individual themes represented on the canvas. Shadow, on the other hand, is seen here in a positive light, as the seed of awakening, the gateway to our unconscious and the primary source of light. The images and their deeper meanings come to life from these two opposites, indelibly marking the artist’s stylistic signature and the narrative line of his painting.

Notes about the artist

Alessandro Del Pero was born in Bolzano in 1979. He graduated in Architecture 2005 from the University of Florence.

In 2007 he moved to Barcelona where, in addition to collaborating with a number of architectural firms, he began to devote himself intensively to painting as a self-taught artist.

In 2012 he finally abandoned his work as an architect and moved to New York, where he lives and works until 2019. Since 2012 his painting work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in Italy, Germany, the United States, Brazil, and Venezuela.

In 2015 he made his first institutional exhibition in the Rio Grande do Sul Museum of Art in Brazil. Since 2021 he has been working between Italy and Vienna.

Hybrids and anthropomorphs in Alessandro Del Pero's new exhibition in Brunico

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