M. B. Rigobello Autizi (En)

… FOR THE PRETENCE OF A URBAN VIEW

Pietro Dente is an artist fascinated by the urban landscapes of great metropolis, which he transfigures in lands of imagination. His pictorial art works, on canvas and Plexiglas or plastic, are complex in their chromatic mix and use transparencies, light games and the perception stimulated by the materials. The Plexiglas is for this young artist a kind of materic air in tune with the atmosphere of the urban views, and yet, a hint at the deception in which senses can lead you. The canvas below – the hidden plane – represents something mysterious instead, as he likes to think that among those background furrows, powerfully scratched, lies the sense, the code, to which comprehension rarely gets. The decision to place a Plexiglas plate on the canvas creates intriguing optical illusions, conflicting and overlapping relations with results that can be variously interpreted: different visions from different points of view.
The use of several techniques, capable of making paint, graphics and photography to interact with each other, reveals a path of research that moves freely from real to fictional with interesting intertwining of light and colour, two dimensional and plasticity, reality and fantasy.
In such expressive context the colour, strong and intense, becomes the founding element which gets more brightness and dynamism from Plexiglas. In this way, the art work transforms itself in a sort of vision, a glance on the complexity of modern world and on the cities intended as a psychological state of their invisible inhabitants: creative spaces or spaces of continuous change. Places where being and becoming form disquieting emotional states that hang in the balance between a desire of peacefulness and evident, unsettled restlessness. The idea of creation comes into such concept of becoming, too. Each Pietro Dente’s art piece retraces the concepts of shapes and composition.
The catalogue of shapes is endless: until each shape has found its city, new cities will continue to rise, Italo Calvino wrote. The words of the writer could explain the work of the young artist from Padua.
In the world, inside a future and futuristic dimension, new metropolis keep rising, sometimes on organized spaces and sometimes untidily. Huge cities spring in Mexico, Australia and Middle East and they are, as someone says, capable to absorb the criteria of digital revolution in a sort of great urban Wikipedia. The famous free encyclopaedia based on participation and being open can become the ideal model for the creation of a city from nothing. A city on which anyone can take part. A city of which seems to get possession and imaginifically design Pietro Dente’s art, cast into a visionary dimension that gets sometimes to being even joyfully metaphysic. As for the Greek colonies which used to rise from the desert, with the difference that they had their city of origin as a model. If in the 60’s Bernard Rudofsky talked of architecture without architects, today ideally Dente pursues a promethean vision of an invisible and supposed creator of shapes. Or maybe, as it happened in the open and democratic system of ancient times, the vision is that of the ideal project of citizens who pour their expectations and shared collective sense of places in which to live, on the formal results of architectures.
It becomes engaging to think that these are Pietro Dente’s cities.