Franco Marletta's Rediscovered Works in a Penthouse Museum in Turin

On November 7, 2021, the first edition of Osservatorio Nova Express closes in Turin—a rooftop museum conceived by Gianluigi Ricuperati in a superattico on the eighth floor of a building on via Santa Giulia, offering views of the Po River, the Mole Antonelliana, and Superga. The main attraction is an installation curated by Maurizio Cilli dedicated to the recently rediscovered work of Franco Marletta (1936-2011), a little-known painter who produced 2,000 paintings and drawings. Ricuperati describes Marletta as one of the best-kept secrets of Italian painting from the 1960s and 1970s, comparing him to a messenger of Russian Cosmism—a theoretical movement blending science fiction, Sovietism, and atheist theology that imagined bodily resurrection through science and technology to colonize space. Marletta's figurative delirium features dystonic animals, dystopian humans, mechanical insects, saturated colors, geometric forms of unthinkable cities, and eyes awakening after millennia of darkness. His work evokes the concept of singularity as envisioned by Ray Kurzweil. The exhibition is part of the Torino Art Week 2021.