Nuzio Terrano

The first time a spectator sees Nuzio Terrano's works, he will, with any doubt, feel captivated. This does not happen thanks to strange alchemies, but thanks to the deep Mimetism shown in his paintings: the artists' contact with reality, together with some expressive needs, has always revealed men's subconscious need for nature.

It is good to specify that the Hyperrealism, the term that defines "bringing mimesis to an extreme level", (a Greek word that means imitate reality and nature), not only appears in the photographic reproduction, even though he uses this strategy to capture his subjects, but it also represents a way of personal interpretation focusing on two features. The first one, based on his placid and reflective modus vivendi, is the need to represent man in his paintings through an ethnographic point of view which aims to underline people's way of living and their settings, often far away from us, to give them back their soul thanks to a visual idea of the place and of the people themselves. The second feature is the personal interpretation that the painter instils in the painting: the images of landscapes and the images that he takes from pictures, in addition to being used for practical and logistic reasons, are "proto-subjects", in which mimesis takes an interior identification meaning: people in their faces and in their postures, objects as tools, necklaces and jewels, next to them, and pigmentary moods of the backgrounds change thanks to highlights and variations of more delicate details.

Not only this procedure is a practical technique, but thanks to the fact it has been expanded with the variation of subjects characterized by the same setting and by the same theme, it allows the painter to create parts of a visual novel, with plausible traits which, once they have been combined, represent a mixed twine of events of the same plot.

But that is not all. Terrano's personal Hyperrealism is enriched in its peculiarities by a thin atmospheric layer that is able to change the consistency of the visual perception of reality, slightly overflowing in a faint Romanticism. A string expertise; nearly lenticular, must be considered in the definition of pictorial details, even the tiniest ones, starting from the obvious recall to the 17th century Realism from the Netherlands. According to Nunzio Terrano, precision, clouded particulars, seek for specific details of Realism and perfection not only are practical means to paint, on an abstract point of view, they also are incentives that allow the painter to visualize in his mind finished subjects, ready to be inserted in a faraway story.

Siro Perin