Francesco De Grandi's 'Come Creatura' Explores the Sacred in Painting

Francesco De Grandi (born 1968, Palermo) presented the solo exhibition 'Come Creatura' at Rizzuto Gallery in Palermo in 2018, as a collateral event of Manifesta 12. The show set a visitor record for the gallery. The exhibition is a museum-scale project that delves into the supernatural and the sacred, inspired by Rudolf Otto's concept of the 'Wholly Other'—the mysterious, fascinating, and terrifying. De Grandi's painting acts as a time machine, blending styles from Flemish and German Renaissance, Baroque, Romanticism, Symbolism, and science fiction, with references to Tarkovsky, Rimbaud, and Dylan Thomas. The show opens with a giant Eden painting featuring Adam and Eve among animals, and closes with a triptych transposing three New Testament episodes into a decadent Palermo: 'Entry of Christ into Palermo' (2015), a flagellation scene, and 'Compianto al Cristo morto' (2017). Between these, works explore the feminine mystery, with fluorescent green paintings and drawings of monsters, saints, ascetics, and dystopian landscapes. De Grandi's painting is described as indifferent to trends, achieving full maturity in color, line, and iconographic revision. It engages obsessively with tradition while carrying a contemporary vibration, subverting through audacious shifts. The artist aims to recenter the human, offering heavy, rooted, auroral images that overcome postmodern copy-pulse and weak thought, returning to narrative and the voice of things.