Marco Puca's Seismic Visions at Ancona's Pinacoteca Civica

Marco Puca (Ancona, 1973) presents a series of works at the Pinacoteca Civica di Ancona that explore the historical trauma of earthquakes in Italy. His complex, elusive iconography features distant faces and bodies swallowed by abysses, never returned to life. The geographies become sites of mourning, reminiscent of Lucio Amelio's celebrated Terrae Motus collection, created after the 1980 earthquake that devastated Campania, Basilicata, and Puglia. In Puca's watercolored black and white, cracks transform into screams, delineating anxious spaces of the earth that trembles and teems with life within, yet on the surface is a dark omen of fatal change. Like a new symbolic seismic map, line and color—characteristic elements of these paintings—appear in perpetual motion, never static, but continuously expanding and evolving. At the same time, one hears the rumble, the cataclysm that upends but also heralds, in calligraphic wings, a jolt of rebirth in the eternal cycle of life and death. Yet against the earthquake, flight has no wings. The exhibition is reviewed by Fabio Petrelli.