Saracinesche

From Thursday, April 9, 2026, Prometeo Gallery is pleased to present Saracinesche, a solo exhibition by Giuseppe Stampone along with an essay by Ilaria Bernardi.

In the story Saracinesca by the Turkish writer Murat Özyaşar, the obsessive repetition of daily life translates into a mental geography made up of closures, forced paths, and thresholds that lead nowhere. The “Road of Coercion”, which the protagonist travels until he is exhausted, is not merely a physical place, but above all an existential condition marked by inertia and the impossibility of opening up. The final image of the shutter – sudden, silent, definitive – thus acts as a metaphor that is at once concrete and symbolic: it is the sign of a limit, of an interruption, but also of a gradual darkening of the gaze.

It is precisely the image of the rolling shutter that Giuseppe Stampone adopts as a critical device for his new series of works – each entitled Saracinesca, indeed – transforming it into an iconographic element capable of questioning the present. His shutters, drawn with a Bic pen, are superimposed on the great masterpieces of art history, themselves meticulously redrawn with the same medium: from Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation of Christ (c. 1455–1460) to Beato Angelico’s The Annunciation (1437–1446), from Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434) to Antonello da Messina’s Veiled Woman (c. 1475). However, far from being a simple act of appropriation or citation, the drawn copy of the masterpieces of the past, partially hidden by the shutter, creates a visual and conceptual tension: the shutter, in fact, does not completely erase the underlying image, but obscures it, interrupts it, and renders it partially inaccessible.