Pierre ANTONIUCCI

Pierre Antoniucci produces a work carried out with constancy, far from any fashion effect, in which both the pleasure of painting and the concern to reflect on the painting appear.

The centre of the painting is the place of dazzle and as soon as you reach the edges, you are closer to something hard, you feel that there is a frontier, a passage from one world to another, from the real to the unreal.

The founding process of Pierre Antoniucci's work is to be found in his "Circular Workshops": The painting is constructed from a hollowed-out centre that leads the figures to the edges of the frame in such a way that the composition resembles the throw of a billiard ball; each motif bounces off the edges and by a centrifugal sequence the space of the painting is drawn up by its perimeter.

Pierre Antoniucci brings us into the proximity, into the beauty of those ordinary things that have lost their function, that no longer have any use, but have become beautiful "in themselves", with time. The objects in his paintings are reminders of life, such as those that can be seen in the frescoes of Pompeii, or in what the Japanese painters of the 18th century called "tranquil objects". In Antoniucci's works, we can find the "traditional" pictorial genres: portraits, still lifes, landscapes, figured scenes... The initial composition, in barely visible ink, allows us to locate the main objects, to position the images and the materials that are eventually pasted onto the canvas. The paint will then cover everything and give the whole thing its lightness, make the backgrounds appear clear, make the space vibrate, reinforce the colour intensity of the objects.

In each of his works, all the elements of the pictorial composition (shapes, planes, figures, textures, colours, tactility...) are requested. Pierre Antoniucci affirms the pictorial gesture, the play of forms and materials, the burying or bursting of images, the possibilities of metamorphosis. From a composition, a painting can appear by resonance, by repetition, shift, rotation, sliding, tilting, reversal, making new colours or materials, new spaces emerge..