Interview
Paolo Petrucci
Paolo Petrucci was born in Rome in 1939. After obtaining a classical high school degree, he attended an artistic high school where he studied painting under Andrea Spadini. At the Art Academy, he was a pupil of Mario Mafai.
Paolo entered the film industry as an assistant director and often worked on films directed by his father, Antonio Petrucci, who was a journalist, director, and teacher at the Centro Sperimentale Film School in Rome.
From 1968 to 2004, as he continued painting, Paolo collaborated with RAI as a director and author of cultural programs, many of which were about art and painting techniques.
Paolo has received several prizes for his art documentaries, among them the Gran Prix de la Qualité de l’Image at the XVIII Festival International du film d’Art et Pédagogique, for the documentary Lorenzo il Magnifico, a biography of the Florentine patron and politician told with the aid of works of art and historical places.
Paolo has assiduously kept painting, exhibiting his works in Italy and the USA. His painting, The Three Bishops (1963), is on display at the Vatican, and another has been bought by the Modern Art Gallery in Rome. Several of his works are part of private collections in Italy and abroad.
What is your background and how did you start your journey in the art world?
“They tell me that I began to smear sheets and pillowcases with colored pencils from the age of three. To those who asked me my name, I answered, Paolo Petrucci Painter. Age made up for my presumption. As a boy, I loved the works of the Roman School – especially Scipione and Mafai. To my immense pleasure, I later became a student at the Art Academy in Rome. In those days, my painting was already thick, engraved, spread with the aid of a spatula. A line of bitumen separated the surfaces. I came to a turning point when I became familiar with the work of William Congdon (a member of the ‘action painting’ group led by Jackson Pollock) and Nicolas De Staël, both of whom I consider my maestros.
I was already mixing the traditional colors of the ‘Roman School’ using the putty knife technique, but the spreading of the ‘color paste’ became more refined.”
What inspires you?
“For many years, landscapes have been the only subjects of my inspiration. I’ve never chosen the landscape, instead, it has always been the landscape that has chosen me, capturing me with its curved lines and its architecture. I filled my sketchbooks with notes, elaborating these ideas and then transferring their essence onto the canvas.
Since 1978, the human figure, and especially the female one, with the gentleness of its lines and structure, inspired me to create the synthesis I had already achieved with landscapes. The mythology stories widely represented in classic art, pushed me towards a new challenge: telling them with my style, using my synthesis of colors and forms, always moving away from the image given by the great masters and always looking for new synthesis ‘metamorphosis.”
What themes do you pursue? Is there an underlying message in your work?
“In addition to the landscapes, the seascapes, the nudes, the still lifes, the glimpses of the cities visited, a theme recurs from the beginning until today and it is Piazza Navona, I cannot pass through the center of the city without taking a leap and spending ten minutes soaking up its colors and its sky. It is unique. When I’ve fully assimilated those sensations, a painting is born - small, medium, 120X100. It’s my little fixed idea, obsessive and immoderate tendency. Visit it and you will see that it will take you too.”
How would you describe your work?
“Judging and writing about one’s own painting is difficult. To explain the feelings and the secret motivations that bring an artist to express themselves is an almost impossible task.”
“I think that a pictorial work should strike the sensitivity of the beholder, without the help of any additional explanation which would only turn art into a literary exercise.”
“In March 1965, after visiting my first personal exhibition, Carlo Laurenzi, a journalist known in Italy for his elzevirs, wrote: ‘This young man’s enthusiasm is mild, almost sad. Painting seems unavoidable to him, it’s something that devours him, to which it would be reasonable to oppose, if only the attempt wasn’t so vain’. According to me, this was an apt observation, and my whole life as a painter has always been motivated by that feeling of inevitability. During the most unimaginable moments, often upsetting my girlfriends, the fever would take possession of me, and after squeezing the tubes, I would grab the putty knives and start squashing the paint on the canvas or the masonite.”
Which artists influence you most?
“ In addition to Mafai, Congdon and De Stael whom I consider my teachers, my work as a TV director has allowed me to visit the most important museums in an optimal condition, without an audience. This has allowed me to study and savor the great masters, without time limits and without being distracted. I believe that all of us painters who look at the figurative experience, are influenced in some way by the great masters.”
What is your creative process like?
“To explain the feelings and the secret motivations that bring an artist to express himself is an almost impossible task. An art-loving friend of mine says that the artist, in the moment when he paints, doesn’t know what he’s doing, or the reasons that are leading him to create. He’s like someone who (ignorant of his own anatomy, bone structure, muscles, and nerves) moves from one room to another. This person only knows that he covered a distance, but he’s completely in the dark regarding the impulses which, starting from his brain, made his legs move.
I can’t say he was wrong. I often don’t know the reason I painted a certain picture, I only know that I did it and that the finished work is alive. Or if it was born dead, that I can’t do anything but destroy it. I don’t know the reasons that brought me and still bring me to paint. I only know that anxiety often takes hold of me and pushes me to do it. That inevitability is like thirst, or hunger.”
What is an artist’s role in society and how do you see that evolving?
“Today, the artist doesn’t have the institutional task of depicting—work, the derelict, problems—rather, the artist is a generator of sensations, of aspiration to beauty and to culture. A storyteller.
In an age where cinema, television and photography give us an exact vision of the world, painting is the only art form which allows the story to be told through the immaterial substance of color.
To tell—and not to copy— the lights, shadows, sensations, poetry, observed, filtered, and by then imaginary things.”
Have you had any noteworthy exhibitions you'd like to share?
“After the first exhibitions of my youth, my commitment as a TV director made it difficult for me to exhibit but it didn’t stop me from continuing to paint. On the contrary, it always gave me new stimuli and ideas.
These are some of the exhibitions I’ve participated in:
2022 – Thematic virtual exhibitions on ArtPlacer.
2007 – Solo anthology (1967-2007) at the La Pigna gallery – Rome.
1967 - Personal exhibition at the Lo Scalino gallery - Rome.”
