Matteo Lucca | Felice Nittolo – Nel segno del fuoco

‘NEL SEGNO DEL FUOCO’, an artistic dialogue between Matteo Lucca and Felice Nittolo, curated by art critic Luca Maggio, opens on Friday 2 October at 6.00 pm at the niArt Gallery.
The works by the two artists, created in glass, terracotta, bread and metal, are juxtaposed and engaged in a creative dialogue with one another: conceived and created over different decades and in different contexts, they highlight how the two artists are united by a shared passion for the same materials and for the energy of fire, the central theme of the exhibition.
Matteo Lucca’s metal fragments of busts, faces, arms and crossed hands represent a development and further exploration, in his most recent works from the 2020s, of similar themes previously explored using bread. His informal approach is most evident in his works in aluminium and mixed metals, where the human form is reduced to fragments created by successive castings onto a mould, much like Felice Nittolo’s aluminium Menhirs – blocks that straddle the sacred natural and the anthropomorphic. It is no coincidence that the Sumerian verticality of Nittolo’s two stelae in terracotta and fused glass is mirrored by the horizontality of Lucca’s Mani di pane.
The two artists are constantly engaged in a dialogue and exchange with the experimentalism that characterises their work. In this regard, it is always worth quoting what Felice Nittolo wrote in 1984 when explaining his ‘A-rhythmism’: “…propongo un movimento Artistico che abbia all’origine la “tessera” come veicolo per esprimere un’idea. Tessera di qualsiasi materiale, di qualsiasi forma, di qualsiasi dimensione; accostata e allontanata improvvisamente, costante e disomogenea nello stesso tempo-spazio. Creare, generare, “dipingere” con la tessera che ha in sé il potere naturale di vivere per secoli. (…) Il movimento non è necessariamente musivo, parte dal musivo (tessera) ma vuole coinvolgere l’Arte in senso generale“