This exhibition aims to raise awareness of the work of Nicola Nannini

Nannini's painting evokes reality with a sharp, clear gaze, giving us the flavor of landscapes, buildings and people only found in few other contemporary Italian painters. Yet, one should not mistake his way of "seeing" reality for a mere optical recording. Gombrich again warned the reader not to confuse "seeing" with "visual sensation" and recalled the important role of memory in pictorial practice. In this regard, in fact, he quoted the great English landscape painter John Constable, who maintained that "art gives pleasure through memory, not through deception". It is important to highlight the exquisitely "mental" aspect in Nannini's painting - also appreciated for its ability to convey the almost hallucinated flavor of certain realistic glimpses. Although his technique, which some have compared to the great Flemish and Dutch tradition and others to Ferrarese Metaphysics, can corroborate the impression of a realistic painting - truer than life -, the presence in his works of some expedients reiterated over time - such as, for example, the habit of leaving the lower margin and sometimes the edges of the canvas unfinished, almost to show the fictitious nature of the vision, or the insertion of characters in the landscape as if they were pieces of a collage -, tell us that the artist is interested in the representation of what cannot be detected with the senses, rather than the matter of illusionistic mimesis. It should not be surprising, in this regard, if, commenting on Leonardo's belief that painting is an entirely mental process, a few years ago the late Alberto Agazzani noted that «there does not exist and there will never be a painter who wishes to stop at the appearance of things, above all a figurative painter." . As a figurative painter, Nicola Nannini has mainly explored the genres of landscape and portrait, often trying to make them coincide or, better yet, to make the physiognomies of the second appear on the morphology of the former. His most famous paintings are those that portray the flat and silent geographies of Padania - a toponym which here has no political meaning, given that it derives from Padus, the Latin name of the river Po'. These are places that the artist has known since childhood and has continued to frequent with his eyes and memory, to the point of turning them into metaphors of an interior condition of enchanted suspension.