From 3rd to 27th May 2011 Velan will present an exhibition by the artist Pietro LERDA (Caraglio, CN, 1927 – 2007) with a selection of works from his production dating back to the years 1955-1968. In this creative phase the techniques of wax and china ink on paper prevail, as in his Profiles, but also in the series Schemes, a theme alluding to the impact which the advent of television and all the immaterial cosmos of the media provoke in man, like the modifying action of optical perception over personal and social cognitive process. Pietro Lerda anticipates the ‘medialism’ twenty-five years before its birth and, in the words of Giovanni Cordero, - the research, which has a strong ethic core, starts from the monochrome works of the middle Fifties, in which he abandons little by little every figurative temptation experimented before, to come to an abstract synthesis of mark, form, colour and contents. - The interior of television studios turn out to be flash-interiors, luminous openings which become myth – landscapes and human beings undergo a metamorphosis to become Screen – Men, as the artist himself calls them in the titles of his works. The works in the exhibition are collected under the common title Pages of a Diary and they offer to the spectator a reflection about the frantic pulsing of a mass society which stresses the disaggregation of a vision of man without centrality, evaporated in an absurd entangle of fragmented marks, lacerated in an unrecognizable condition of adrift humanism – (Ivana Mulatero) in a suspended representation – so writes Pietro Lerda – of silences and waiting measured second by second. -Using the artist’s words – the man involved in this world suffers the rules of the play, and he becomes trapped in them but at the same time is fascinated by them. Trying to represent graphically and pictorially these situations in the form of almost daily diary, the pages or the canvases let us perceive a sense of denunciation or pure evidence, a participation or a refusal: it is my way of being socially engaged in my own time. Since the beginning of his artistic research Pietro Lerda places side by side painting and drawing, tracing in this way the typical traits of his production: the importance of mark and the inseparable connection with light.