Edited by Renata Caragliano
Mousse Publishing, Milano, 2025
“Light is never merely an optical phenomenon, but a vital impulse and a freedom of vision—a bridge between seeing and knowing.”—Eva Fabbris
Pietro Lista. In controluce accompanies the exhibition at the museo Madre, curated by Renata Caragliano, and unfolds as both an exhibition device and a documentary atlas. Conceived after two years of research conducted with the artist and his archive, the publication retraces more than fifty years of work through photographs, archival documents, invitations, reviews, and previously unpublished materials.
Umbrian by birth and Campanian by adoption, Pietro Lista has constructed an artistic universe grounded in freedom, restlessness, and openness to the world. Since the late 1960s—beginning with La scoperta della luce, realized in Amalfi in 1968 for Arte Povera più Azioni Povere—light has stood at the center of his research. Not as a purely visual effect, but as a generative and critical principle: an energy that interrogates matter and space, linking perception to knowledge. Across painting, sculpture, and performance, light becomes the language through which Lista reflects on memory, time, and transformation.
Rather than a conventional retrospective, In controluce traces the underlying continuity of Lista’s vision through passages, refractions, and returns. The exhibition unfolds across five thematic sections—each introduced by a key work—guiding readers room by room through the museum’s second floor, from the Nuvole to Nero di Marte, from the Corpi acefali to more recent reflections. After the close of the exhibition (September 15–December 31, 2025), the catalogue remains as an archival document: a space where the experience can be revisited and reinterpreted.