“Leggera anzi leggerissima LUCE” – Solo exhibition of Klaus Karl Mehrkens curated by Giuseppe Simone Modeo – from 8 July to 16 August 2023 – Crypts of the Cathedral of Città della Pieve

After months of affectionate and exciting study of Perugino’s work, Klaus Karl Mehrkens pays homage to the Renaissance master with six paintings. He does so with an exhibition – in the year of the five hundredth anniversary of his death – right in the birthplace of Pietro Vannucci: from July, 8th to August, 16th it will be possible to admire the exhibition “Leggera anzi leggerissima LUCE” at the crypts of the cathedral of Città della Pieve. The exhibition is open every day from 9 am to 6.30 pm. Free entrance.

What does it mean, today, to pay homage or celebrate a Renaissance artist of immense stature, an artist who has dedicated his life and his art to transduce the statuary world, firm, unchangeable even from history, never totally intelligible or usable by Piero della Francesca towards human grace, serene, reconciled, totally enjoyable by Raphael?

Mehrkens, a German-born Umbrian painter, knows how to deal with the imponderably great. He knows that the only form of transduction is recondutio ad minimum , that is, looking for a single element, a single quality among the many that have made Pietro Vannucci great, and try to open it to the contemporary deep sense.

This is why he chose to describe and narrate, with six paintings, the light that Perugino stole – new Prometheus – from Piero della Francesca and the rosy color of the incarnations and faces of the figures of his disciple Raphael.

The light that Pietro Vannucci stole from Piero della Francesca was a zenith light, totally present on the pictorial surface without any indication of origin or destination. A light that is in itself, capable only of manifesting itself without manifesting the passage of time. As if it were always and exclusively noon! It is a light with a surreal or hyperreal value that enters the pictorial scene as a protagonist and not as a secondary appearance nor as an instrument of exaltation of other figures or, in its negative representation, as a shadow, of relief deprivation. “Ombra mai fu” wrote Georg Friedrich Handel in the opening aria of the opera Serse ed ombra mai fu in the light of Piero or in the skies of Perugino, totally full of bright, aircraft but still, celestial.

Mehrkens pays homage today to those skies, hovering on the celestial canvas or harmonizing colors, which have the ability to expand like aerial gases in the sense space and in the horizons of contemporary perception. Nothing can stop that expansion, nothing can support it materially, nothing can trace its boundaries and give it form. It is breath, whether you want soul, lightness, sensation or perhaps still levitation.

Pink is a difficult, risky, complex and misunderstood colour. Under the sky that Perugino stole from Piero della Francesca, under that sky Raphael placed his madonnas, building pyramids of beauty, not algidamente but sensually rendered, through the rosy complexion of the faces and the soft and luminous skin of the children Jesus and Saint John. The famous rose that surrounds the complexion of the distracted and distracting angels of the Sistine Madonna. These pinks, those incarnates, deprived of form, substance, limits but amplified both in the sense and in the perception of color, are rendered by Mehrkens in the works on display. A sensual rose that by Klaus, to contemplate, not to touch, to love without being able to kiss; a rose distant for the height of its own not hidden beauty.

We must thank Klaus Karl Mehrkens for the loving study with which he approached the work of the great Master of Città della Pieve, becoming a perceptor, propagator and amplifier of some of its notes of color that still today make beautiful the physical world and the universe of art.

The exhibition is organized by Bramo Srls, in collaboration with the association Euke, and has the patronage of the Municipality of Città della Pieve. Corriere Pievese, L’ora del Trasimeno, Seilatv are media partners.

More info on:

Press Office: Associazione Euke

e-mail: associazione.euke@gmail.com – phone: 335/7753763