In Una Notte, SMart Collection for PAGLIARA CONTEMPORANEA

In the summer of 2024, the first piece of the Se ti stavi nascondendo dall’amore, mostra [If You Were Hiding from Love, Show] project was installed at the Saracen Tower in Roccalumera (Messina)—thanks to the support of the Salvatore Quasimodo Literary Park. This installation marked the conclusion of the residency of Maurizio Pometti (Catania, 1987), the first artist-in-residence guided by associate curator Alessia Pietropinto. Pometti centers his artistic inquiry on memory, reclaiming old, yellowed photographs—often the only remaining traces of forgotten lives. His painting imbues these images with a melancholic beauty born of nostalgia and empathy, transforming them into open-ended narratives suspended between what is known and what can only be imagined. His subjects—whether famous or anonymous—take on a universal quality, embodying our collective lived experience. While his figurative style may appear reassuring on the surface, Pometti’s work conceals memories, fears, and a sense of *saudade* that exquisitely open the door to fresh, ever-changing dialogues. His art thus becomes a mirror of our inner selves, a space where a perpetual “Proustian moment” is triggered: every face and every detail awakens personal emotions and memories. The artist steps softly into scenes that are not his own—fragments of lives lived upon which we project our own “what-ifs” and regrets, filling narrative voids with our own lived experiences. It is within this fragile intersection of individual and collective memory that Pometti positions himself, acting as an almost silent witness to memories that might otherwise be forgotten. And so, with the work *In una notte*—permanently installed at Palazzo Calabrò—Maurizio Pometti transforms his experience in Pagliara into a fragmented, poetic landscape that serves as a true legacy of what he saw and lived there; photographs, canvases, and drawings merge into a unified whole where nature, light, and imaginative details converse in harmony. The work represents an emotional and sensory journey through the location, in which time, silence, and memory overlap to create images suspended between the real and the surreal.