12. Francesco Lauretta (Ispica, Italia 1964)
Epitaffio, 2006-22
Olio su lino, neon, pittura murale
Oil on linen, neon, mural painting
Misure ambientali – tela 143 x 215 cm | Environmental dimensions canvas 143 x 215 cm
Courtesy: l’artista e Collica & Partners San Gregorio (CT)

23. Francesco Lauretta (Ispica, Italia 1964)
Idiota, 2023
Olio su lino | Oil on linen
38 x 202 cm
Courtesy: l’artista e Collica & Partners San Gregorio (CT)

24. Francesco Lauretta (Ispica, Italia 1964)
Noia II (Trittico), 2025
Olio su lino | Oil on linen
140 x 100 | 150 x 100 | 140 x 100 cm
Courtesy: l’artista e Collica & Partners San Gregorio (CT)

25. Francesco Lauretta (Ispica, Italia 1964)
Noia III, 2025
Olio su lino | Oil on linen
130 x 80 cm
Courtesy: l’artista e Collica & Partners San Gregorio (CT)

Noia (Boredom), Idiota (Idiot), Epitaffio (Epitaph): these are the titles of works by Francesco Lauretta (Ispica, Italy, 1964), a protean artist who uses painting as his primary medium, while constantly reinventing its form across different series. His style does not derive from an exclusive exploration of painterly language, but rather responds to specific experiences—both physical and conceptual.
This freedom makes him resistant to the logic of the art system, which often rewards recognizability and marketability. Lauretta, by contrast, rejects aesthetic coherence in favor of ethical coherence, grounded in philosophical values and a circular vision of existence, where every element—people, symbols, languages—is both connected and autonomous.
His painting operates on two interwoven levels: as an affirmation of artistic freedom against cultural flattening, and as a vehicle for ethical inquiry, emphasizing virtue, memory, and meaning.
The selected works revolve around a single, universal theme: death. The death of values, of emotional bonds, of spirituality. Lauretta responds to this theme with three distinct painterly tensions. Noia draws on de Kooning-inspired gestural abstraction to portray a narcotized, senseless present. Idiota is an intimate and poignant portrait of his deceased father—a reflection on how death brings into full view the depth of lost affection. Epitaffio depicts a crucifix laid horizontally, suggesting a double death: first on the cross, and then symbolically, through the erasure of spiritual meaning—reduced to a nameless, hollow epitaph.

12. In Epitaffio (2016), the body of Christ is shown lying on his side, seemingly abandoned, like a forgotten painting left in storage. A neon sign spells the word “Epitaffio,” yet no actual inscription accompanies the figure—there is no praise, no memory, only absence. The lyrical and unsettled soul of the artist from Ispica surfaces here in a stark denunciation of the spiritual crisis of our time: a society more concerned with numerical growth than with the depth of its values. The blood-red background becomes a cry, an open wound, an act of resistance against the cold materialism of the present.

23. Idiota (2023) is a solemn and tragic painting of great emotional intensity—an ode to the uncompromising will to be an artist. Lauretta portrays his father lying in the tabbutu (Sicilian for coffin), still and silent in the finality of death. The image is inspired by a poignant passage from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, in which the consumptive Ippolit, contemplating Holbein’s Dead Christ, wonders: “If the Master, on the eve of his crucifixion, had seen this image of himself, would he still have climbed onto the cross? Would he still have died as he did?”
But in Lauretta’s painting, death is not an abyss—it is revelation. The father, who in life “never understood nor wanted to know,” now rests with a peaceful, reconciled gaze. He seems to suggest: if I had seen myself this way, perhaps everything would have been different.
In the mourning room lie two coffins: the father’s and the symbolic coffin of the painter himself. His brush touches his father’s body in a final gesture of love—a painterly, cathartic caress attempting to soothe a pain that was deep, devastating, and unresolved in life.

24. – 25. Noia (2025) – Francesco Lauretta writes:
“When I paint girls posing before sunsets, I like to imagine invisible forces pressing down on their bodies. It’s the sunsets themselves that dictate both the pose and the figure’s devastating tension—images sourced from Instagram. These are bodies resisting representation.
Instagram may be a paradise of images, but not of imagination: it’s an unstoppable stream of visions that seem to reproduce themselves endlessly, a paradise that’s also a hell—for the image itself, and for our ability to imagine. The painting, instead, is a battleground. A silent, boring, but deeply ancestral struggle that painting still hasn’t resolved.
After the image comes the story, and then something else. And then rhythm. Rythmos in Greek means form.
After years of grappling with the fundamentals of painting—from trompe-l’œil to exploring the unstable textures of the real, from mimetic practice to gradually building a personal language like an engineer constructing his own tools—I’ve arrived at a realization: I’ve fallen in love with painting.
And within my plurality—or impersonality—I’ve found my place in a vast, boundless arena. The field of boredom. Boredom is incommunicability. And it is to this boredom that I dedicate these bruised paintings, conceived as triptychs. I find them exciting precisely because they confuse”.