Starting in the 1990s, Peter Halley began to transform the architectural space through digitally generated mural works, sometimes developed in collaboration with other artists. The project created for Museo Nivola focuses on this aspect of his work: Halley has completely transformed the museum’s temporary exhibition space’s walls, in tune with the mission of Museo Nivola, an institution dedicated to Costantino Nivola, one of the protagonists of the movement for a “synthesis of the arts” at mid-century. In the old public washhouse used by the museum for temporary exhibitions – a clear and linear building similar in shape and proportions to a church – the tone is joyful and lively, the space euphoric. Entering from the terrace – a light-flooded environment overlooking the museum park – the visitor will experience a visual shock produced by Halley’s favorite fluorescent hues and the images’ exuberant and dynamic character. Arranged in a scheme recalling the Italian fourteen-century fresco cycles, which suddenly rises in a series of colored waves, the surface combines the artist’s painting’s distinctive repertoire with art historical references from the Renaissance to Warhol, from Matisse to cave art.
“The installation – states Giuliana Altea, curator of the exhibition together with Antonella Camarda – enhances the contrasts in Halley’s painting. It is both conceptual and decorative, critically reflective and spectacular, intensely contemporary, and nourished by the dialogue with art history. It combines opposite polarities, not so much to seek a synthesis between them or to try to reconcile them, but rather to put them in tension and trigger short circuits of the viewer’s imagination.”