FELICE NITTOLO

MEMORIE PREZIOSE /
KOSTBARE ERINNERUNGEN
18 marzo – 1 maggio 2022

Städtischen Galerie
im Kulturhof Flachsgasse

Speyer – Germania

Vernissage venerdi 18 marzo ore 18,00

Saranno presenti il sindaco Monika Kabs ed il direttore della galleria Franz Dudenhöffer

Locandina

Pieghevole

Precious memories

“Memory is the only paradise from which we can never be evicted”
Johann Paul Friedrich Richter

The words of the German writer Jean Paul guide us in discovering the artistic activity of Felice Nittolo. This selection of his works bears witness to their creator’s vivacity and to the way that still today – after so many artistic seasons – this force contrives to permeate his creative progress in the rediscovery of memory.
In his workshop, the artist (like a modern Efesto) uses a small hammer and chisel to give life to innumerable precious coloured tessere. The use of mosaic is Nittolo’s way of describing a memory, an emotion, a profound narrative.
The tessere interact in an admirable manner in weaving relationships which open the way to new possibilities, in addition to those which characterised them in other periods and with different aspirations. It is from this starting point that Felice Nittolo’s work arises and takes shape.
Works like Campo di Grano (The Cornfield), Brani di Poesia (Scraps of Poetry) and Scrittura di Pietra (Inscribed in Stone) bring to life a repeated motif which the artist has frequently expressed as ‘Mediterranean’. The Latin derivation of ‘Mediterranean’ is ‘among the lands’ and thus the symbol can bring to mind a stalk of wheat grown on a hillside, the verses of a poem among the pages of a book or a phrase engraved among our recollections
The artist chooses to follow various pathways and thus when the absence of tessere becomes a presence, he contrives to recall a vanished time, glorious and splendid. There remains on the sackcloth a memory, a richly suggestive concept which exalts that which a first glance might seem to be missing or incomplete.
In the various versions of the Vestigia series, Felice Nittolo is not making a simple act of subtraction; on the contrary, his action becomes a symbol of memory of the presence.
It is true that these traces and these vestiges become contemporary relics without legendary fame but they are, in apparent contradiction, full of meaning: to quote the words of Marc Augé, “a reality which recalls a more or less undefined past”.1
That which Nittolo has achieved through his work is a journey in time through the collective memory in its appeal to colour. The pigments used by the artist become ambassadors of an archetypical stroll among the aesthetic conventions of the past. It is enough to contemplate the series ofMemorie di Bisanzioand Vestigia, impronte; the nuances of blue, green and gold are surely in direct homage to the mausoleum of GallaPlacidia in Ravenna, where the artist has lived and worked since the late sixties.
That proposed by the artist is an intense offering, rich in details, where the works appear to

have actually suffered the ravages of time – a conscious testimony of a period of the past which becomes the present.
Felix Nittolo ennobles time. Facing his work, we are overcome and disoriented but then the reordering of our own memories - of our own most precious memories - comes to our aid and invites us tosubmerge into the rediscovery of our own past.

Riccardo Betti