Nicola Pecoraro's Hybrid Sculptures and Ghostly Drawings at Ermes Ermes

Nicola Pecoraro (Rome, 1978) presents his second solo show at Ermes Ermes in Rome, featuring a new cycle of works that explore urban form through ruin and ambiguity. The exhibition includes sculptures made from recycled souvenirs and evanescent drawings, rewriting the coordinates of everyday objects and evoking an imaginary, spectral Rome. Glossy fake fruits, toy gladiator helmets, and other banal objects merge into hybrid sculptures recast in bronze, acquiring a decadent, theatrical aura. Pecoraro elevates kitsch to nobility and gives sculptural weight to consumer goods, composing post-human bodies that seem to emerge from an archaeological future. The works oscillate between the sublime and the caricatural, transforming the remnants of a touristy, globalized Rome into unstable relics that evoke both market and myth. Alongside the sculptures, the drawings arise from impulsive gestures, scanned and transferred onto paper in a controlled degradation of the image. What remains is a ghost-image where details escape and reality fragments. The sheet becomes a surface of apparition: intermittent presences, traces that suggest more than they show. With this dual register—plastic and graphic—Pecoraro stages a poetics of instability, where every object is suspended between oblivion and resurrection. The exhibition is curated by Michele Luca Nero.