Ermanno Brosio & Reto Pulfer “Appointment with the Artist” at Palmieri Contemporary, Savona

This edition’s invited artists are Ermanno Brosio and Reto Pulfer, with Antonio Grulli’s curation. The residency will conclude, as in previous editions, with a publication, this time curated by Antonio Grulli, that gathers together conversations between everyone involved in the project alongside a selection of photographs taken by Marcello Campora.

Persimmons, beach umbrellas, tents and farinata
The stories of how I came to know Ermanno Brosio and Reto Pulfer are very different. I only met Ermanno a few years ago, when he was still studying at the Brera Academy in the Atelier of painter Marco Cingolani, one of the great hotbeds for new art in Italy today. He was part of a group of young, very talented artists, quickly making their way. I met Reto, on the other hand, around 2008, when I was in London: we had some dear friends in common and we went out together. We lost touch for a while and only reconnected again recently. Their works are in perfect dialogue. The foundation of this conversation is the use of fabric as a fundamental material in their work and as metaphor and membrane for our living in the world, and yet the inflection that each of them then give to this couldn’t be more different. Ermanno’s starting point is clothing, in particular clothes he finds and reuses in his works; for Reto fabric is a sort of habitat and way of inhabiting the world which he then often moves away from into drawing and sonic research. From these descriptions you might think of two sculptors or artists who mainly work with installation or performance, but for me Ermanno and Reto are actually both painters, although they sometimes devote themselves to other mediums.

Ermanno starts out from found clothes to make his canvases, and the result is surprising because he always manages to be extremely painterly. First off, he tends to mount the fabric, and this already marks a departure from the past in which the use of these materials was attached to a step away from the idea of the mounted painting. But even more surprising is the control that Ermanno exercises over the textiles and the extremely orderly way in which he transforms them into ‘canvas’ and into compositions so rigorous and considered that the viewer perceives the whole thing as a real painting, avoiding the collage effect or ethnic/folk flavour. The materials are cut out and matched up to make precise fields of colour and form that slide continuously back and forth between the abstract plane of chromatic composition and the figuration that emerges when we recognise and can name the pieces of used clothes (jacket, collar, sleeve, etc.) This is clear in the works present here, where Ermanno has used fabric from items typical to a seaside resort, such as disused beach umbrellas and tents, objects that exist between clothing and temporary architecture, and which allow us to survive the summer outside. They are strongly “abstract” canvases, almost animated by a musical or syntactic rhythm, onto which words or phrases are sometimes added.

Reto has a primal approach to painting. He generally creates shelters of a sort or precarious tents with the textiles, liveable environments that are then, sometimes, sets for his performances and at the same time the surface on which he paints. His painting style is minimal and often slips into the practice of dyeing. The final result is achieved largely by the combination of larger or smaller sheets of different colours, sewn informally together. On these surfaces minimal, fragile marks are added: lines, stains, interventions made with thick pigment which Reto prepares using anomalous, organic materials. His painting tends towards the state of music, and almost manages to touch it: moving inside one of his environments gives the sensations of being immersed in a symphony of noises and micro-sounds. Or perhaps his painting tends more towards the state of cooking: an organic, natural gesture which recalls the preparation of simple, primordial elements, necessary to life, in which provision is part of the cooking and at the same time a way of relating to the world, allowing it to live. These hippy, psychedelic shelters in which the ribbons and wires that hold them up have a fundamental role, sometimes transform into sets for sound performances or cooking sessions: rituals in which the material support dematerialises into a state of being and feeling, traversed by light or maybe to the contrary, transporting us back to the texture and weight of the first caves into which drawn marks crowded, accompanying the physical and spiritual life of humanity.
—Antonio Grulli

at Palmieri Contemporary, Savona
until June 6, 2025