In conversation with Tullio Pericoli

Is narrating with words an experience comparable to that of narrating with images? Can one exist without the other? Can there be a visual imagination without the words that mold us or a verbal experience that is free from the images that we carry inside? In his long and successful career Tullio Pericoli has never ceased to contemplate these questions, and has answered them with his art, his curiosity, his extraordinary ability to watch and listen to faces, behaviors, but also trees, clouds, soil. As a political and cultural cartoonist, as illustrator of literary works, as a world-famous author of writers’ portraits, as landscape painter, set designer, and finally as a theorist of his own artwork, Pericoli teaches us that behind every stroke of the pen or the brush, there are a thousand stories. With lucidity and generosity, Pericoli opens the gates of his art and invites the curious viewer to stroll between the lines of his paintings – lines which, as he likes to say, have a history, a physiognomy, a grammar and even an interiority.