Lorenzo Scotto Di Luzio. Pane al Pane

No. 3 Largo Avellino, once a barber’s shop, is Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio’s chosen location, where he has inaugurated a new exhibition space for the Fondazione Morra Greco, located at street level and exposed to the gaze of passers-by, with the site-specific installation entitled Pane al Pane (“Bread to Bread”), involving the construction of a hydraulic system inspired by the theme of abundance. The work, a rain of red wine falling from the ceiling and settling in a large collector tank, explores and develops the already broad repertoire of works by the artist featuring richly ambiguous allegories, in the ongoing conflict between austere elegance and the sense of the grotesque. With Pane al Pane he seems to create the most opulent of bacchanalia: the rain dissimulates, presenting imaginative perceptions of nature itself, but then dirties and rots. The installation, which was born as a “dream” and dies as a “slaughterhouse”, becomes tangible in the total perception of smells, color changes, a decline in volume, offering itself in its constant mutations throughout the duration of the exhibition. At the same time, its frontality becomes a necessary condition in the annulment of the perceptual value of its outline, to show itself simply as a picture that at every new gaze is always different. Developing in recent decades with the gradual collapse of ideologies sanctioned by the fall of the Berlin Wall, abundance, the idea of a seemingly unlimited and inexhaustible consumption of resources and raw materials, broke down with the collapse of the twin towers in New York and the ensuing economic crisis, so giving way to one of modern humanity greatest fears, already at the center of Pasolini’s prophecies in the late seventies: the fear of poverty. Here the dimension of the happy hour is magnified and, through the use of enormous quantities of wine sprayed explosively across the slippery setting of the exhibition space, the artist declares bluntly that the search for abundance, like the waste constantly associated with it, lies at the center of reflection accomplished through the work. Pane al Pane, an expression that constitutes a moral appeal to the reality principle, serves as a reaction against a false ideology that needs to be demolished.

Trained in the Neapolitan studio of Giuseppe Desiato, Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio, following his studies at the Istituto d’Arte, turned his attention to elements of the popular universe and ideology, interpreting them in fantastic, tragicomic or estranging ways. From 1992 to 1994 he promoted the “Open Studio” multimedia project together with Giulia Piscitelli and Pasquale Cassandro. By relating and articulating different media, from drawings to videos, installations, photography, sculptures, performances and sound works, Scotto di Luzio participated in numerous group exhibitions such as Intenzione Manifesta (2014), Castello di Rivoli-Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin; The 6th Momentum Biennial, Moss in Norvegia; Futurama. Arte in Italia (2000) at the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci di Prato; Castelli in aria. Arte a Napoli di fine millennio (2000) and Napoli anno zero. Qui e ora (2002), Castel Sant’Elmo in Naples; Le opere e i giorni (2003) at the Certosa di San Lorenzo at Padula. In 2007 the Madre devoted a solo exhibition to the artist, curated by Mario Codognato.