Pietro Moretti: Sete

Through a new body of paintings and watercolours by Moretti, the exhibition traces a portrait of a nocturnal, hallucinatory metropolis, inhabited by unfulfilled desires. "Sete" metaphorically evokes the human inclination towards desire: a thirst for the world behind which, at times, lies the frustration born of the precariousness that inhabits us.

In Greek mythology, Tantalus, King of Phrygia, is condemned in Hades to stand in a river beneath luxuriant fruit trees. Whenever he bends down to drink, the water recedes; whenever he reaches out to eat, the fruit is carried away by the wind. Tantalus’s punishment is to remain standing, immersed in the river and tormented by hunger and thirst. For Moretti, this thirst, to which desire is condemned for eternity, provides a point of departure, resonating with his inclination to explore inner states that are never confined solely to the psychic realm of his representations. The water of an unspecified river runs through several of the works in the exhibition, connecting them to one another: a silent passage through the folds of the city, evoking the fragile hopes that sustain it.

In the exhibition, Moretti constructs a Mnemosyne of contemporary archetypes – the body, human and interspecies relationships, the bar, the street, the city – bringing together an elsewhere composed equally of reality and fiction.