ROME.- Fondazione Giuliani is presenting A Sort of Song, a two-person exhibition of Peter Marcasiano and Michele Tocca. While belonging to different generations and artistic contexts, both artists have developed forms of painting grounded in an unusually sustained attention to things. Bringing their practices into dialogue, the exhibition explores the ways in which painting can transform our perception of the familiar: through repetition and observation, through the rhythms of routine, and through an attentiveness that allows ordinary objects to acquire an unexpected intensity.
The title refers to William Carlos Williams’s 1944 poem “A Sort of a Song”, in which the American poet reflects on the relationship between language and the physical world. His proposition that there should be “no ideas but in things” is less a rejection of ideas than an insistence that thought should emerge through contact with the material world. This principle offers a point of departure for the exhibition, in which onions, fish, flowers, fruit, brooms, windows, dust and changing light become occasions for sustained looking.
For both artists, repetition is a form of investigation. Returning to the same subject does not produce the same painting: instead, infinitesimal differences become visible. Marcasiano repeatedly painted modest objects, allowing each encounter to register a different relationship between form, space and time. His small-scale paintings, built from thin layers of heavily diluted paint, often reduce objects to their essential contours. Their delicate surfaces and subtly unstable perspective create images that appear both precise and strangely suspended. Marcasiano sometimes returned to works months or years later, recording the dates of his interventions in pencil directly onto the canvas, thus allowing duration to become physically embedded in the painting.
Tocca’s paintings are similarly rooted in observation, but often capture the singularity of recurring circumstances and phenomena rather than accumulate successive encounters. Condensation on a window, houses seen at a distance through a pair of binoculars, dust gathering in a corner become subjects through which changing conditions of light and atmosphere can be registered. His paintings are made directly from observation, often in the domestic spaces of his own life. In this way, the exhibition considers domesticity not simply as a subject but as an alternative model of artistic production. The kitchen becomes an atelier; routine becomes a discipline of attention; the spaces of everyday life become sites for seeing and making. This shared proximity to domestic life is also central to Marcasiano’s practice. Working in his Paris apartment, he developed a daily ritual around a restricted vocabulary of subjects. For both artists, the domestic challenges the traditional idea of the studio as the privileged site of artistic production.
A Sort of Song ultimately brings together two forms of devotion: Marcasiano’s return to the same object and Tocca’s concentration on the uniqueness of recurring phenomena. Their paintings share an almost angelic quality of attention, coupled with a sense of stupor before things that might otherwise remain invisible. In both practices, the ordinary becomes a site of quiet wonder.
Peter Marcasiano (1921–1984) was born in a small village near Benevento and emigrated with his family as a young child to New Jersey. After studying at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and the Art Students League in New York, he moved to Europe in the early 1950s, spending extended periods in London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Florence and Rome. He settled permanently in Paris in 1968 where he developed an artistic practice largely outside the dominant narratives of the time. He exhibited only once during his lifetime, at Galerie Welz in Salzburg in 1959. After his death, his work remained largely within his Paris apartment until its gradual rediscovery, beginning with its inclusion in Centre Pompidou’s Les Promesses du passé in 2010. Subsequent presentations include Family Affair (2018), Début d’hiver at Double Séjour (2021), Nature morte at Galerie Valentin (2022), and My Onion Canvases are Ballet… at DS Galerie (2025), Paris.
Michele Tocca (b. 1983) lives and works between his hometown, Subiaco, and Rome. He studied painting in Italy and Belgium before completing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in London (2011). Solo and two-person presentations of his work have been held in institutions, galleries and independent spaces including: AM-G-5, Glasgow; FLAG Art Foundation, New York; Fondazione Coppola, Vicenza; Studiolo Bureau, Milan; z2o Sara Zanin, Rome. In 2023, his work was the subject of a major solo museum exhibition, Repoussoir, at GAM – Galleria Civica di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin. Major group exhibitions include: Rethinking Romanticism, CAMeC, La Spezia (2026); Vita Minore, Musei Civici, Spoleto (2026); Journeys, Alma Pearl, London (2025); La Collezione, GAM, Turin (2024); Italian Painting Today, Triennale Milano (2023); 63rd Premio Termoli, MACTE (2023); Alma Pearl, London (2023); Le realtà ordinarie, Palazzo de’ Toschi, Bologna (2020); Out Looking Inwards, Praksis, Oslo (2019).
