Pietro Coletta (Bari, 1948 – )
Already in 1979, Pietro Coletta appears in a project curated by Giuliano Gori: the exhibition “Le alternative del nuovo,” which features eight young Italian artists presented by an equal number of critics. Coletta is chosen by GilloDorfles, who admires, as he writes in the exhibition catalog, “the play of shadows, partly real and partly fictitious, which gives life to a sort of perspective reality.”
At the invitation of Giuliano Gori, the artist continues his research in this direction. In the small room overlooking the corridor on the first floor of the farmhouse, he decides to permanently close the shutters of the small window. Natural light should not distract from his idea of creating a perspective space based on the (halogen) light bulb, which is the only pre-existing object in the room. In front of the artificial lighting, he sets up a sturdy, curved metal sheet to suggest that it bends under its weight, constituting the real part of the installation. Above this element, thin steel wires, the color of green glass, hover, stretched to draw hypothetical transparent slabs in space. The fictitious part in this case continues in the choice to lightly cut into a beam of the ceiling but above all in applying an extremely thin layer of green to the wall, suggesting a reflection of the glass.
