Maurizio Pometti

The series of drawings, watercolors and paintings that come together in the exhibition project Io cresco by Maurizio Pometti are a visual and emotional journey that explores growth as an intimate and at the same time universal experience, a path that intertwines personal transformation and reflections of the collective human experience. The works reveal, through delicate signs and compositions, the complexity of relationships, the fragility of bonds and the incessant desire for evolution. Each painting and drawing tells a stage of growth, a step towards awareness of one's own vulnerability and strength, opening a space for profound reflections on identity and its changing nature. Among the works, the self-portrait as a child evokes the purity of an original gaze, root and memory, while the face of an adult man, unknown and inscrutable, seems to allude to a possible future or to a projection of the artist himself, another self in which to lose and recognize oneself. Alongside these faces, scenes of lovers, kisses suspended in time, bear witness to the complexity of bonds and the ephemeral beauty of existence. Every portrait, every gesture, suggests not only the intensity of relationships, but also the subtle, inevitable sense of transience that accompanies every relationship, an undercurrent of constant melancholy and a gentle emotional suspension. The titles of the works, such as "I couldn't wait to grow up" and "The eyes of others are our prisons", evoke reflections on identity and external conditioning, while in the most recent figurations, such as "This is the last time" and "I don't remember his name", the artist seems to turn his attention to a more intimate path, of awareness and detachment from past ties. Through techniques ranging from oil to tempera and drawing, Maurizio Pometti builds a recognizable and emotionally stratified imagery. The frayed and often opalescent line awakens deep memories. For Pometti, pictorial language becomes a means of introspection and detachment, a lens through which to observe one's own growth and offer it to the observer as a contemplative experience. Io cresco invites the public to recognize themselves in these moments, in the portraits of a love, in a look of curiosity, in a suspended caress, making the exhibition a dialogue between self and other, between memory and desire, between the individual self and the universal self. In this journey between light and shadow, Io cresco celebrates growth as an embrace of change, where art becomes a mirror and a refuge, a ground for authentic understanding of oneself and of others. Pometti reminds us that growing up means accepting the beauty and complexity of becoming, recognizing in the faces and gestures of these works an invitation to improve oneself and to delicately welcome the many facets of human essence.

Maurizio Pometti proposes a survey of memory, not only autobiographical or familial. Unlike photography, and its illustrious predecessors that aim exclusively to crystallize some past or personal experience, his narration often borders on anonymity or, better, camouflages the artist's identity in the interpretation given to disparate objects with strictly symbolic content. An overlapping of author and work is thus conveyed by manipulated images, alternating observation and dreamlike transfiguration and evoking contradictory reactions of recognition and disavowal. The suspension between the two cancels realism and space-time unreality and asks the viewer to enter and live exclusively in the current dimension of the work. Overflowing into the environment of the installation with his signs and drawings on the surrounding walls, Pometti materializes this exclusivity by annexing the physical context to the artistic text.

Fragments recovered from old dusty albums of yellowed photographs, worn by time, the only testimonies of past lives, unknown and perhaps forgotten. Maurizio Pometti tries to restore the beauty of life to them, a melancholic beauty, imbued with that nostalgia that invites us to imagine the life of the subjects, their doubts, their emotions, the stories that those photographs sketch but never fully tell. Games of glances and knowing smiles that say everything and say nothing, too far away to tell certain stories, but far enough away to allow us to invent one. Pometti's brushstrokes smell of empathy, of the past, of grandma's house, of an elementary school birthday party and of the night before exams. The subject doesn't matter - known or not - because it is charged with the Absolute, it becomes the universal bearer of Us, of our experiences and the artist succeeds perfectly, always with education and grace, in bringing back to life shreds that no longer have any life. His is painting in the purest and most innocent sense of the term, comforting in its figurativism, but only apparently reassuring. Behind it, in fact, are hidden - or we ourselves hide - memories, monsters, saudadis that load the paintings with other values. The game is not in Pometti's hands, nor in the photographs that inspire him and that are reincarnated and regenerated in the dimension of the painting: it is all in our mind. A continuous Proust syndrome that makes the painting so exaggeratedly emotional in that cut and paste of details, faces, glances. The artist tiptoes into the scenes of a life that does not belong to him. And we are just behind him, non-paying spectators of a show that we are not authorized to watch. We slip into a game of glances in which we are not even considered, to which, however, we attribute our glances, our doubts, our maybes, our who knows, slaves of Sehnsucht, of the potential of our actions and the echo of our regrets.

If Painting makes (still) faded memories alive To fix forever in a clear and sharp way the memories and recollections of faces and places, of moments and facts, seemed a mission definitively accomplished and concluded with the advent of photography. Its images, clear, tangible and sharp, had given everyone, since his first attempts, the illusion of a perfection that no other artist would ever have achieved, not even the most capable. Photography immediately seemed an alternative to that painting to which, for millennia, man had turned to fix his own visual testimonies. Today, even though we are in the midst of the times of the image society, we know that this assumption is not true at all and not only is painting not a dead or defeated expressive code, but it has also been completely "rediscovered" in the light of its, perhaps, unexpected topicality. More necessarily evocative, than an instrumental fashion accessory as it has been for some authors (?) of a recent past. Maurizio Pometti fits perfectly into that context of artists who have, instead, committed to granting painting – in his specific case the iconic, non-abstract one – the benefit of the doubt, the possibility of still being able to be a narrative medium, a guardian of the emblematic tenacity of symbols and emotions not completely processed by our contemporaneity or by the most superficial attestation dictated by the sense of truthfulness and plausibility. His silent images affirm that hidden part of our feelings that is what gives us back our best humanity, capable of not denying, not being ashamed, not hiding the need for feelings. Pometti does it with resolute delicacy, with certainly grace, with an attitude that appears abandoned, casual, but is the result of an attention and care felt and shared to the depths of their reasons. His hasty gesture, composed of clear brush strokes that solicit the color, its vibrations and its nuances to their continuous recomposition, takes memories from old photographs and frees them to a different sharing in the interpretation moved, solicited, by his own chromatic passages. After a disturbing and virtuous exercise of broad colors, in his most recent works Pometti narrows his palette, reduces it and approaches a monochrome tendency in which the variation of a single color must establish the multifaceted uniqueness of the dilated boundaries of his images. What appears on the canvas becomes the precious pass that transfers from the photograph, circumstantial, private, immobile and unchanged, the succession of a story that opens and activates welcoming the emotion of other gazes different from his own thanks to the expressive potential of the pictorial medium thus conceived. Private and public, individual and universal, blur their limits and boundaries and pour into the unexpected and imponderable richness of the pictorial image, which emancipates vision from contemplation to the emotion of experience, a multifaceted and ever-changing sensitive value. The instinctive acceptance of what is captured in his canvases places the narrative of the pictorial image at a higher level of empathy with the gaze of the public precisely by underlining the explicit compromise with the singular experience of each. Pometti's painting fascinates us, surprises us, urges us with the power of his silence which, between composition and dissolution, indelibly affirms in our consciences the driving force of our memories returned to being images present before us. Real not because they are iconically true, but because they are sensitively wrapped in the delicacy and grace of our feelings.

Artist Residences Villa Greppi There is something that comes from the past in Maurizio Pometti's paintings: an echo, a thread that is intertwined in memory (individual and collective) and that belongs to the history of our country. An all-Italian story. An atmosphere and an iconography that have the flavor of a historical novel, of a neorealist film, of something that belongs to us, a blurred yet persistent memory. It is no coincidence that among his literary references Pometti cites The Catcher in the Rye – the Bildungsroman par excellence – and The Leopard – a true icon of his region of origin: Sicily. “In my painting I try to recover the value of memory where man, always at the center of the scene, lives in a place that unites us all”, explains the artist himself, “I believe that every place is contaminated by our experiences, by our life and by the events that unite our lives like a transparent thread”. Pometti's works start from photographs collected here and there. It doesn’t matter who the protagonists of those photos are: the image, captured by the lens, surpasses the very existence of the immortalized individual, becomes absolute, continues to live autonomously. The bodies and faces of people Maurizio has never met become the subject of his pictorial universe. Bodies and faces that no longer have a space-time, that seem suspended in a rarefied and evocative place, shaped in the matter of dreams or distant memories. The blue monochrome, this particular chromatic range on which Pometti insists, makes this sensation even deeper, projecting the observer of the painting into another, timeless dimension, familiar on the one hand, distant and imaginative on the other. For him too, the experience in Villa Greppi is not passing without leaving traces on his painting. While remaining faithful to his stylistic code and his subjects, in the works created during the residency period Pometti has dared to use a more decisive and defined brushstroke, which affects the contours of the figures more, accentuating their plasticity. He also had the opportunity to reflect on the value of the landscape. Seduced by the magic of the Villa’s park (and perhaps also by the drawings of Alessandro Greppi, a source of inspiration and “guardian deity” for many of the project’s residents!), Maurizio began to experiment with the theme of the natural landscape, in works conceived in dialogue – almost forming diptychs – with his compositions with figures.

SICILIAN DIALOGUES - Abstract dimension, a sensitive horizon | Emotional body, a meeting place Dedication and perseverance are the two key words that best distinguish Maurizio Pometti's attitude towards painting. His poetics has always aimed at a figuration that links the pictorial image to memory. In his first paintings he portrays subjects, both male and female, with whom he identifies and in whom he finds confirmation in a physical and mental empathy, of fragility and weakness. The creation of one of his works originates from ideas that are close in some to photographs, in others to drawings or often, the conceived image is transferred directly to the painting. In any case, the idea is the principle that guides the creation of the work; it is the painting that comes to life and the artist submits to the will of the canvas. The first Lockdown allowed him to reflect in a completely different way from the usual way he approached painting, leading him to focus on breaking those patterns with which he had always been used to working. The forced closure, the greater time available and the isolation led him to question himself and so he began to subtract, decontextualize and free the figures in an empty, white space. This neutral background, synonymous with freedom and silence, is flat and without distinctive features at the level of pictorial writing, but remains potentially active. The technical data remains fundamental for him: in the single figure he keeps alive the precision and attention to detail that he has always had in all his paintings.

Maurizio Pometti is a painter who feels life even in the smallest things. A look, a hug, a smile, are enough and are enough to grasp the beauty of existence. By telling the happiest moments of life, always crossed by a subtle underlying melancholy, Pometti recalls, with his delicate painting, Pavese and Cardarelli. If you leave me, you betray me imprisons forever on the canvas a moment destined by its nature to evaporate and dissolve into nothingness. These two evanescent figures seem to interrupt the tranquility in which they are immersed with a phrase that contains the secret of love, which is bond, torment, worry, fear of being abandoned in some way. But also revenge. And Pometti, who tells us neither the before nor the after of this intimate moment, invites us to grasp the beauty of the passing day, because tomorrow is uncertain, and of today we will only keep a faint memory.

ArtiVisive San Fedele Award 2019 – 2021 – The human and the divine, the adventure of freedom If then suddenly a deer appears… The reflection on freedom followed by Maurizio Pometti is born entirely within the reasons for his being an artist and his painting. A figurative painting. A painting that has always been imbued with memories, experiences, life, even before drawing, color and brush strokes. A painting capable of tracing, through its images, the coordinates of a narrative dialectic that, starting from personal events, then has the strength to address, involving him, the other. In this, the complicit contribution of memory and photography is a means to give clarity, to orient sensitive intentions to prepare them to satisfy the sense of what the painting has to express. Then a fracture. For Pometti, as for all of us, Covid-19 was a moment of clear caesura that, marking a before and after, without preventing him from working, led him to reflect mainly on himself and on the meaning of his “depicting”. Thus the terms of his painting slowly introduced new structural elements that imposed a different aesthetic and a different logic. The sweetened sentimental precision, sincere and full of affection, that governed his hand, gave way to a more conceptual monochromy, where the tonal passages became more concise, tight in a minimal variation, and the void conquered most of the surface. This isolation of the figure, this constriction within the apparent nothingness, for his intentions, transformed into a new conquered freedom that emancipated the narration of painting to a more introspective, silent and mental dimension. The freedom of reflection has pushed Pometti to place the painted image in a dimension no longer tied to vision, but now inserted in an absolute place that puts the gaze in the condition of having to deal with the true weight of perception. The elements appear, emerge (or immerse themselves?) in the storm - because it is full of feelings of its (our) under the skin - atmosphere of quiet assumed by the color. The liberation occurs, therefore, by absence and the grace in subtracting brings the breadth of breath of a decontextualization without constraints, orientation and clear directions. Without giving up iconographic elements that are dear and proper to him, in What else is there? - a work that constitutes a passage in the poetics of the young Sicilian artist - three deer appear in all their labile and impalpable consistency. Everything appears as if blurred, elusive, nebulous, and yet it becomes certain for its iconographic strength, for the power, new in him in such terms, of the symbol. Of good that wins over evil, of the spiritual that loosens the grip of the material. The eye searches and scrutinizes to access, with awareness, a silent knowledge that knows how to be, with more determination, enabled and liberated by its painting. Certainly it is a freedom linked both to individual will, but also to destiny that, written for us, always reserves its unexpected surprises. So freedom is, for this painting, that of becoming, as never before, an extraordinary moment of personal and intimate reflection.

His pictorial work appears at first glance almost traditional and descriptive, with a narrative without jolts, calmly figural. But in duration, in non-distracted or superficial contemplation, it reveals unfathomable dislocations, tremors, delicate and refined ambiguities, torments and overlapping depths. Whether they are familiar scenes and from his childhood, whether they are old rediscovered photographs, frames of memory, sudden flashes on the screen of a domestic and daily time or on the magical fabric of phantasmagorical evocations, these images have life, duration and depth of metaphor in crystallized and foggy settings, suspended in an instant as if of infinity, strongly and ambiguously evocative. It is a rediscovery of the founding reasons of painting, a calm and inspired passion for research on the reasons of memory and reality.

From the text on Maurizio Pometti Alessia Calzoni, Melissa Freti, Joëlle Lupi and Lorenza Romeo students of the course in Teaching Artistic Languages (prof. Matteo Galbiati), Academy of Fine Arts of Brescia SantaGiulia A painting that becomes the mirror of distant memories, the murmur and the shadow of a labile and uncertain memory through which the artist retraces his personal experience, taking a journey inside his most intimate conscience, facing the most hidden fears. Maurizio Pometti's artistic production is delicate and refined, but at the same time notably tormented, retracing familiar scenes and his childhood that take place in settings crystallized in an infinite instant, which brings with it feelings, sensations and past reminiscences that emerge in the present. These atmospheres are rendered through a full-bodied, nervous, hard and symbolic material; a dense line, applied with a quick and synthetic touch that defines, but at the same time dissolves, generating dreamlike universes in which the real data is reworked through his experiences. Photography - from which he takes inspiration - is, in fact, the preparatory element that leads him to the final work; sometimes instead the creative gesture is dictated by an impulsive act that shapes silent landscapes, inhabited by enigmatic, immobile and silent individuals who integrate completely into the empty and muffled space, where a strong sense of bewilderment is perceived. The in-depth interior investigation and acceptance of one's being are carried forward in the artist's pictorial reflection, giving rise to figures that reflect his (and our) deepest fragilities and insecurities. These are imbued with a strong sense of nostalgia for the time gone by, for that joyful childhood that ended and which forcefully re-emerges in the melancholic awareness of the days now lost and of their limited existence at that distant moment of life: the cheerful and carefree eyes of a child who smiles, but who reveals all his suffering. Through the canvas and paper, the fear and the recollection of a painful loss of loved ones are manifested, who have contributed to giving shape to these suspended images that populate Pometti's mind and translate into new images and related new sensations and feelings. Emblematic are, among the subjects represented, the mysterious apparitions of deer, symbols of the instinctive strength of the body and soul that embody the passage between the earthly and spiritual worlds. Looking at them, one is attracted by a narrative that becomes universal and that, like an emotional call, stimulates the strings that resonate in the most hidden human interiority. A story that is made his own by every man who, moved, finds himself confronted with an astonished present.

Logbook - Chronicle of a Pandemic In the work known to us by Maurizio Pometti, nothing is as close to an intense and alienating involvement as the monochrome figurativeness that the painter entrusts to gray, to the monodic veering of his stamps, whose results, however, come close to the effects of photographic gradients that time passes over, retouching the image with its own hand. The suggestions that take place there and those that they trigger seem to act only through a constant pressure, which seems to denote in itself a certain coldness of approach, of desired detachment: but it is like the covering that conceals the resonances, the hidden variations, which flow into it from less obvious directions than those that the immediate iconic content might lead one to think of. Only in this way, only in this visual range, not otherwise or elsewhere, can those sensitive addenda of the thing felt before being seen, lived without anything pre-existing or premeditated having contributed to it or taken part, be manifested, which a renewed evocative tension draws from the directly figurative side of his works. And a figuration that seems to derive from a degree of abstraction of both the sign and the memory, almost as if it were the matrix, however, to be certified more than the visual data that is documented by the painting. It is thus that those figures take on an abstract relief, less tied to a referent the more they possess the traits and the character of it that are more easily identifiable, evident, to the limit. While the color tone is affected, even if it is not a consequence of it, by a plastic density, by a peculiar mood that emerges from a deeper material stratification that does not denote the depth of a distance, but the persistence of a figurative potential that is not totally tied to an image, that asserts itself, making the figures more credible, more within the reach of the senses, even though, then, this fruition does not allow itself to be dominated by their prescriptions: and this gives the drawing an incisiveness that, again, is not left to the mimetic rendering. The image exists in the memory as a vision, one might say, more than as a memory: it is not a real element or it does not matter if it is so because the sign can be retained, much less by a color that does not have to be guessed, to exist for itself. As if abstract and figurative, concrete and imaginary, painting and photography, while belonging to specific fields, were connected, without one prevailing over the other, in an identical determination of synthesis: that of a form: which in painting is not a premise or a result, but an original autonomy of narration: or an assertion or the voice only, perhaps, only its timbre, indeed: the assumption of a moment or of an entire destiny before an acquisition of which one can boast possession or conquest - or lament being lost, if this is enough to make it the sign of a loss. As, precisely, in this Lost: there can be no room for a story, for a tale, even just for a metaphor: time and place, one does not know what happened to them. They have been laid down like make-up, stage clothes: a theatre of lights, all gathered in a single light, a protagonist that does not allow supporting actors, that leaves no traces, that dissolves and absorbs everything, shadows and background, giving the image the absoluteness of an icon, of a permanent instance of truth to which the ‘rest’, lost, lost or not, the circumstances, the scene, bear unquestionable witness.

Memory as a dormant and perpetual presence Exploring the artistic production of Maurizio Pometti (Catania, 1987) is an experience similar to that which can be had by entering an old attic, where objects have been still in their places for years and dust has taken over even the smallest space. Despite the dust and apparent immobility, the moment you start looking around you rediscover visions, scents and sensations that bring to mind memories that may have been dormant, but never forgotten. You realize that those inert and superficially lifeless objects, if observed with a gaze turned towards the memory they hold, have their own soul and are always ready to take us on a journey into the past: our past. In Pometti’s work, memory is a determining presence because it is an integral part of each subject that, with care and attention to detail, he chooses to paint: whether it is a person, an object, a landscape or a past episode, each subject takes on its value only in relation to its being a memory and therefore, as such, it shows itself simultaneously in its three-dimensionality and in its evanescence. In many cases, the family is the source of inspiration for the creation of his works, in others the artist himself who, at times, finds reassuring support in old photo albums in which he rediscovers memories of past moments that he stigmatizes and brings back to life on the canvas, demonstrating an extraordinary ability in drawing. Although the atmospheres appear most of the time serene and mild, in the works of the Sicilian artist there is always a subtle tension between nostalgia for the past and the lightheartedness of days gone by; you can feel a melancholy born from the fear of losing those who contributed to making the moments of childhood joyful, but at the same time the awareness of having been lucky enough to live them intensely together with your loved ones. This unconscious internal conflict very often translates into works with a strong chromatic charge that at first sight, thanks to the liveliness of the colors and often the vividness of the scenes, induce a joyful and even playful thought, but on a deeper look they let you glimpse a veil that makes everything less brilliant; a bit as if inside that old attic a layer of dust had left no escape even to these images, determined to remember that the past is a finite time of which we can only retain the memory.

Sleeping with ghosts The concept of death is unknown when you are little, it is something that does not belong to you. You find yourself in the arms of your parents convinced that they will protect you for your whole life, that they will always be young, strong and invincible. You do not even see a flaw in their personality and in the evening you fall asleep feeling their breath on your face. No fear and no worry until, suddenly, you understand that they will not be there forever, at least physically, and that one day they will be the ones who need your breath on their face, before leaving you. Sleeping with ghosts, for Maurizio Pometti, is a slow, gestural dialogue - with an uncovered face - with the fear of loss. Yes, because through the medium of drawing and painting he retraces parts of the personal experiences and scenarios of the lives of his family members as if it were a continuous present. He re-elaborates figures, moments and memories, assembling them like small fragments of a puzzle that the more you put together, the more you find pieces thought to be lost but which, simply, were lying at the bottom of the box. Reconstructing a memory, for Pometti, is an antidote that helps alleviate suffering (future in this case) because it allows one to share one’s bed, almost with resignation, with the torment of the unconscious. It is no coincidence that the artist’s path, in this precise moment of research, takes on different tones compared to the previous period. The palette of grays and blues, expertly laid on supports such as paper and canvas, confers a state of evanescence to the figures and landscapes represented. Memories told as dreams, same consistency and same nuances: because memories almost never present themselves in a clear and limpid way, a veil – shroud – rests on them, altering their light and colors. Pometti’s entire work reveals itself as a compound of delicacy and torment, in memory of what has been and what will be. Exceptional symbolisms are the elements that the artist uses as a narrative, a fil rouge that stages the theater of life lived and how one often wants to change its plot: this is why, in the artist's works, past and future coexist in mental balance. His work also allows for an irony that lightens the tones. If we cannot change a memory, because it is now part of the past, we have the freedom to shape it and lighten it through irony. Pometti's playfulness is expressed in all his compositions and especially in his watercolors which give the viewer a childish innocence. The artist feels free to show the color tests, which scattered on the support, become an integral part of the memory, because when you are little you are not afraid to show yourself and you are not afraid of "adult things".

Without getting hurt from the text of "(fe)male - Pluralism in art" Bodies in eternal balance between good and evil, between happiness and pain, between submission and revenge, between the sacred and the profane, between the masculine and the feminine. Without getting hurt is, in fact, the title of the section dedicated to him. A title that recalls a caress received after a slap, when the skin still burns and the redness is slow to disappear. Maurizio Pometti looks a lot to artists of the past such as Piero Della Francesca, Rembrandt and Francisco Goya but is also very close to the figures of Felice Casorati, Giorgio Morandi and Lucian Freud. In the contemporary context he draws great inspiration from masters such as Franco Sarnari8, especially with regard to the study of the particular and the multiple visions of the fragmented body; and the dark figures characterized by strident close-ups by Michaël Borremans: as in Lily (2017) and Becky (2017), recent works by Borremans that we could define as having a Magritte influence. The works chosen for the exhibition exalt all the power and beauty inherent in human fragility, the artist’s ongoing research. For Maurizio, the imperfection of bodies is that subtle beauty that makes us unique and in harmony with the world around us. The work on display that best represents the theme of contradiction is Non sono un gioco (2017). A triptych characterized by the presence of the artist’s self-portrait, depicted from three different points of view, in an attitude commonly used in fashion photography. The pose is a clear reference to our time, which wants us to be perfect at all costs through layers and layers of filters and packaged poses, a clear quote and the drawing on paper of Barbie, a contemporary doll, a model to follow from an early age (but which Maurizio Pometti translates into art to make it accessible to men too, because if a man cannot have one, because it is considered a female toy, then he can draw it). The artist, in the triptych, represents himself with a tutu that recalls the upper part of a music box (another interesting theme addressed by the artist). The body seen as a delicate element that can protect itself from external blows but not from personal and internal ones, the most difficult to face. I am not a toy is the pictorial translation of the continuous struggle with oneself and recalls the Pirandello metaphor of the mask, as is the work Fidelio, also proposed in the exhibition on paper, which expresses all the need to defend oneself but at the same time to hide that inaccessible and forbidden part.

Collettivainquattroquarti A humanity in balance crossed by the continuous search for its own identity that appears now fleeting, now masked. Reality fixed to the canvas by strong, hard, short and nervous brush strokes mark rough material surfaces mixed with dense and physical color. Almost organic! Surfaces on which enigmatic figures move the gears of a world regulated by superior, powerful and inflexible mechanisms. Maurizio Pometti's painting transmits restlessness and a desire for redemption, rebellion against stereotypes and condemnation to a hypocritical formalism in a continuous game of explicit and deliberate references to classicism and nineteenth-century painting, full of a rarefied and unexpectedly contemporary atmosphere.

Sensorium from the text on Maurizio Pometti Maurizio Pometti investigates the skin of painting through autobiographical paths, with quotes and atmospheres from the last century, which are archetypes of a suspended, isolated and metaphysical discourse. Synthesis and fragmentation give life to a painting that wants to mix the banality of everyday life with the staticity of the ancients, lyricism and symbolism to sublimate fear and eros, in a research where the human figure contains multitudes, enigmas and contradictions. Drawings, paintings and sculptures represent the technical aspect of an artistic language that finds its legitimacy within a poetics that draws inspiration from literature, ancient philosophy, but also from contemporary music, cinema and personal experiences. The theme of the figure and the self-portrait, - which establishes a significant relationship and an identity search that involves the author, the subject and the spectator, between questioning, analysis and rethinking - together with the pictorial discourse dedicated to the human body, represent theatrical sessions and repair mechanisms, aspects of an iconic research in which the details, graphic or chromatic, are elevated through the aesthetics of the fragment, object of reflection and formal variation, between technical refinement and luminous synthesis that brings echoes of infinity. Bodies, portraits and objects are a pretext to investigate and evoke a conceptual dimension on the use of the expressive medium, in relation to the subject and its spatial and temporal, introspective and psychological compromises. Pometti's art asserts itself as a parallel reality linked to the imagination, as a source of ancestral enjoyment, to rediscover its masters together with the language of the origins, and describes a necessary condition in which the artist digs and tries to overcome academicism and technical rigor to give shape to the essence. An investigation that finds its origin in Piero della Francesca, in the mythical dimension in which the double portrait dialogues with History, until arriving at the formal reduction of the twentieth century that from Morandi to Casorati arrives at the disintegration of Giacometti and Brancusi, passing through Freud until understanding the balance and zeroing of Sarnari. Details of the body and metaphysical settings, impassive characters and empty landscapes, geometric elegance and staticity, are a way to give order to the world and approach the depth of beauty, with a voice that understands the torments of man and the secular sacredness of the gesture suspended in the immobility of the image.