“Entering into a work of art and remaining there as long as it takes. Time is the measure of the quality of Gioacchino Pontrelli’s paintings. It is best not to be in too much of a hurry, because every painting, large or small, sends the viewer down various narrative paths. One after the other, they systematically compose the measure of the artist’s work. Curiosity and initial marvel soon make room for a need to investigate more deeply. Their pictorial quality acts as a passport to more complex areas.

The viewer has a certain amount of responsibility: it is up to him or her to cross the thresholds into the various rooms which unfold, as the vision proceeds, in every painting.[…]” As in certain scenes from Terrence Malik’s films, the organizational perfection of the settings in Pontrelli’s paintings is always functional to the narration and never an aesthetic expedient for its own sake. Today his large diptychs are flanked by smaller works. The force they manage to communicate is not diminished, though the movement is continuously and less compulsive, and the images are more suggested than clearly defined. What remains is a dense continuity of references that link the artist’s sensibility to a narration through images, to a visual path that demands attention and care. And time.

After completing his training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, Gioacchino Pontrelli (Salerno, 1966) began research into the re-examination and reinterpretation of objects that define the present-day world in which the artist and all of us live. Pontrelli chooses images to be projected, often from interior design magazines, and then proceeds with the preparation of the canvas and the selection of the colours that will give life to each work. The humanity that emerges from the tables, chairs and other furnishing elements inserted in his paintings transforms them into icons or still lifes.