ALESSANDRO PESSOLI The Golden Hour

Nino Mier Gallery is thrilled to announce The Golden Hour, Alessandro Pessoli’s third exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition features a series of new paintings and sculptures and will be on view in Los Angeles from October 28 – December 16, 2023.

The Golden Hour develops Pessoli’s characteristic merging of Italian Renaissance figuration with pop imagery and psychedelic iconography, executed here within idyllic, dreamlike landscapes. Seven paintings feature figures staged theatrically amidst radiating rainbows, abstracted florals, and other Edenic motifs like birds and blue skies. In two painted maiolica sculptures—a type of glazed ceramic popular in workshops of the Italian Renaissance—playful figures extend their limbs out towards the viewer.

Whereas in previous bodies of work, the body was often a site of tension and contestation for Pessoli, in The Golden Hour, figures are suffused with a peaceful effect. The grotesque hybrids and pop distortions found in past paintings unwind lyrically within each work in The Golden Hour, which reimagines the psychedelic mood of his 2019 exhibition The Woodstock’s Boy. In Anima Arcobaleno (all works 2023), for instance, an angelic figure stands in contrapposto with a slight smile, its eyes gazing outward, slightly beyond the viewer. Geometric, multicolored wings radiate out from either side of the figure, while an abstracted meadow of flowers sprawls out below. In this painting, the figure is not quite of this world—vibrating, quasi-holographic, androgynous—nor is it afflicted by our problems and provocations. Elsewhere, in The Golden Hour, a figure stands before a saturated sunset, miming the victorious stance of the Statue of Liberty, but drained of any political content that might eject the work from Pessoli’s eternal otherworld.

Pessoli’s paintings and sculptures occupy an enduring present-tense, more invested in cultivating a contemplative mood than in articulating a specific moment in time. Nevertheless, the works reference disparate art-historical sources, from the commedia dell’arte figure of Arlecchino, to floral designs reminiscent of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine era, and the interiors of 20th century Italian painter Scipione. The artist’s materials and methods are as various as his references, and include airbrush, oil paint, acrylic paint, and pastels. The force of all Pessoli’s art historical allusions and material expressions coalesce in the singular vision of The Golden Hour – one that is unrestrained in its sweetness and exacting in its atmosphere.