UNTITLED 1

Federico Arcuri

‘Untitled 1’

2025

23 cm x 31 cm / 9.06 inches × 12.20 inches

Watercolor

Signed on the reverse

Certificate of Autenticity included

Federico Arcuri moves through diverse styles and influences, ranging from illustration to art direction and figurative painting. In his canvas works, he explores black-and-white worlds created with chalk, paper, plotter writing, and irregular strokes. His subjects include metropolitan landscapes, subterranean solitudes, and the cinematic imagery of film frames. Arcuri is an artist in constant motion, whose ever-changing mind is driven by a wandering spirit and the illusion of appearances, always in flux.

Arcuri has consistently presented us with paintings where people walk, meet, line up, look at each other—and sometimes see one another, sometimes not. They appear immersed in empty squares, inside subway cars, backlit, or seated on church benches. Acrylics on canvas, chalk, and Japanese paper inserts come together to create medium- and large-format works that seem to move through leaps in space and time. Ephemeral images appear to sink into the depths of one canvas only to reemerge on the next, forming a body of work that oscillates between figuration, geometry, and abstraction.

Federico Arcuri’s research focuses on the study of urban spaces, architecture, and people in transit—subjects he photographs and later transforms into a final image where building lines and pathways from familiar places become impersonal accumulations. This feedback loop proposes a renewed tension of memory, one that seeks to reformulate and reinterpret the relationship between the individual, the environment, and the metropolis. While it is evident that these spaces belong to the city of Milan, in Arcuri’s conceptual reinterpretation they become universal spaces—perhaps dreamlike, certainly utopian. And the encounters are appointments that fade away (…) It is easy to be carried into this increasingly pale and undefined world, where reality, possibility, and fiction are interchangeable. The result is not browsing through many interdependent stories, but entering a single one.

Martina Cavallarin

If contemporary painting seeks to preserve the value of figuration, it is necessary to highlight examples of renewal that give meaning to the artist’s path and shield them from the accusation of working from a stagnant rearguard disconnected from the present. This is precisely what Federico Arcuri achieves—and with great success—because his visual culture is vast and nourished by a long professional trajectory. His work draws primarily from two sources: photography and printmaking, understood not as traditional engraving but as “advertising art” (a term preferable to the more disparaging “advertising”).

Federico Arcuri captures fragments of reality, freezing them into frames selected from the continuum of space-time according to the logic of composition and recomposition—transforming the image into a meticulous inlay of light and shadow, the result of someone who knows how to calibrate disorder. His understanding of solids and voids emerges especially in his personal use of light cuts, which create that characteristic and pleasant post-human suspension (post-human even when figures are present: what society do they testify to? Where do they come from? Do they intend to take control of their destiny?).

Another reference, not entirely far-fetched, is the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, a director who mastered the concealment of altered temporality within the flow of images. The suspensions created by Federico Arcuri resonate with those of films such as Nostalgia, Stalker, and Solaris, to the point that they seem almost pre-existent: in fact, the painter’s most important works date from before he discovered Tarkovsky.

Gabriele Dadati