Piero Pizzi Cannella — Ferro battuto (1993)

Piero Pizzi Cannella is one of the defining figures of contemporary Italian painting and a founding protagonist of the Scuola di San Lorenzo, the Rome group that emerged in the early 1980s and returned figuration, memory and objecthood to the centre of Italian art after the conceptual decades.

Ferro battuto (1993) belongs to the mature phase of that research, in which the everyday object is never depicted for its own sake but converted into symbol: wrought iron here stands for force, craft and duration, yet in Pizzi Cannella's rarefied pictorial space it becomes a silent, almost liturgical presence, suspended between gesture, colour and light.

The mixed technique on canvas gives the surface its material depth, and the large format amplifies the contemplative weight of the composition. Works of the 1990s are the most closely followed segment of his production, and large-format paintings built on his signature symbolic subjects sit at the centre of that demand.

His work is held in public collections including the MAXXI and the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, and has been presented in international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale.