From March 2026, Casa Matteo — Franca Pezzoli Arte Contemporanea hosts a new solo exhibition by Luigi Profeta, a painter whose work does not simply hang on walls but unfolds in layers, in time, in the quiet tension between what is seen and what pulses just underneath.
The exhibition’s title, drawn from Alberto Moioli’s insightful essay for the catalogue, captures the very essence of Profeta’s creative method: glazes that conceal and reveal, stratifications that build depth, and a synchronicity that connects visible gesture to invisible meaning.
The most immediate and striking novelty of this new body of works — titled Tracce, Pensieri Celti, Primitivo, Mi libero da ogni condizionamento, Il prezzo della libertà è la consapevolezza, Preservo la mia luce, Sinapsi, among others — is chromatic. Profeta has opened a window he had previously kept ajar, letting in a more intense, almost unsettling light.
- In Pensieri Celti, solar and vibrant orange pulses with energy.
- In Mi libero da ogni condizionamento, red burns and presses like restrained magma.
- In Preservo la mia luce, a deep, melancholic turquoise envelops the canvas like northern skies or deep waters, guarding at its center a warm, incandescent core — an ember that refuses to die out.
Yet Moioli warns: it would be a grave mistake to stop at the surface. In Profeta’s work, everything that appears is the outcome of a process that unfolds elsewhere.
Profeta is a deeply read artist. He has long frequented the works of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud — so much so that he once dedicated an entire solo exhibition, Totem e Tabù, to their confrontation with the primitive. He knows that the creative gesture is never innocent. Nothing on the canvas happens by chance. Every mark is the result of something that comes from far away, from deeper than consciousness can reach alone.
Moioli draws a compelling line to Jacques Lacan, suggesting that what we see in this series is a visual representation of the linguistic structure of Profeta’s unconscious. The recurring ovoid shapes, returning like personal ideograms across paintings, embody a state of waiting — that suspended tension in which the subject exists between what has been and what is not yet. Waiting, for Profeta, is an existential condition, an intermediate space where desire finds its most authentic form.
Stratification is both technique and metaphor — the heart of Profeta’s practice. Layers of glaze cover and reveal. Strata protect and preserve what lies beneath, keeping it alive in the penumbra. In Sinapsi, the large-format work that opens the series like a programmatic declaration, connections between signs appear neural, organic, necessary: something communicates with something else through membranes of color that filter and select. It is the metaphor of memory itself — Freud’s Nachträglichkeit, the rewriting of the past in the light of the present.
Time is a theme Profeta carries with disarming honesty. He experiences its passing with resistance, feeling drawn toward an elsewhere beyond cyclical, measuring temporality. His rhythms — those repeated signs that scan the surfaces like a wingbeat — are the visible form of this lived contradiction: time that returns, insists, and demands to be traversed again and again.
Preservo la mia luce (I Preserve My Light) is perhaps the most intimately lyrical painting of the series. That turquoise, cold and marine, evoking northern skies and deep waters, protects at its center a warm orange nucleus — an ember that continues to burn. Profeta entrusts himself to painting, and painting responds with an expression beyond words.
Following Luigi Profeta over time, Moioli notes, means gaining access to something increasingly rare in the contemporary art landscape: a practice that proceeds with the necessary slowness of those who dig deep, faithful only to their own vision, finding in their very restlessness — and in a man of extraordinary kindness and intellectual honesty — the primary source of their creative vitality. These works are contaminated by dreams, by nightmares, by the recurring presence of water as a primordial element, the amniotic fluid of a generative creativity.
It is fitting, then, that these canvases find their natural home at Casa Matteo — Franca Pezzoli Arte Contemporanea, a gallery that for years has exercised one of the most precious and rare functions in the art system: choosing with patience, accompanying artists through time, and offering the public experiences to be traversed rather than merely consumed.
“Velature e Stratificazioni. Sincronia dell’invisibile” is an invitation to stop, to let oneself be touched by what thrills beneath the surface. Because that is where Luigi Profeta has always lived — in the invisible.
Based on the catalogue essay by Alberto Moioli, March 2026
Photo credits: From artist’s archive
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