Palazzo Merulana and CoopCulture present the exhibition Without Frame, a solo show by the painter Giorgio Ortona, with critical contributions from Maria Grazia Calandrone, Plinio Perilli and Claudio Strinati.
 

The exhibition project focuses on the contemporary city as an inexhaustible existential and artistic container of pictorial inspiration. Through the numerous works on display, the three traditional genres of painting - landscape, figure, and still life - are highlighted but revisited with an extremely contemporary language. 

It starts with the exploration of Rome, the artist's adopted city and a crucible of layered forms over the centuries, to broaden the view to other cities such as Tripoli (his hometown), Naples, Palermo, or Addis Ababa. Some of these captured even from Google Maps.

Ortona's pictorial universe delves into the reality of everyday life, from domestic interiors to semi-peripheral urban landscapes, with particular attention to the "apartment buildings," not only those in Rome, now historicized. Plinio Perilli describes Ortona's research as follows: "Ortona's expressive network has expanded, soared, and intensified between the proper self (or super-ego, or unconscious Id) that belongs to us, and a series of domestic, or familiar, fellow citizens, urban and suburban portraits, friendly or anonymous... that tame and reshape our

healthy, deep dream and need for Realism."

In recent years, his research also includes the theme of water, expressed through the representation of bathers or places of seaside tourism, such as resorts, pools, and beaches.

The portrait is always directed towards subjects of urban life, such as tourists or athletes, and still lifes, instead, through cement bags or construction materials. Claudio Strinati approaches his pictorial material as being "between definition and erasure, two visual dimensions almost opposite but obtained by him with the same means."

He conceives each of his works not as definitive and concluded, but belonging to a broader and open discourse, which foresees, over time, the revisitation with expressive updates of the painting itself, precisely "without frame," flowing smoothly through the passage of time and its changes. "Giorgio Ortona is the poet of figurative and verbal movement, in the sense that his paintings and the titles of his paintings can change over time. Nothing is crystallized, nothing is still. Everything is restlessness and ferment, nervousness of obsession and restlessness. Vitality, in a word. And the titles that Ortona imposes on the paintings matter because they complete the visual work, often without explaining it, adding mystery, irony, melancholy, beauty to what is seen (and not seen)," thus Maria Grazia Calandrone summarizes her vision of the artist.