Press release | Exhibition essay by Ornella Paglialonga


Runo B presents a series of large-scale paintings, created between 2021 and 2022, alongside an unseen group of ceramic works produced for the show. Runo B’s imagery arises from an in-depth engagement with art history, society, and aesthetics; key elements that converge in a narrative strongly characterized by mass media, a source from which a visual language emerges that the artist transfers to his pictorial vision. The exhibition takes its title from the Cliffhanger series, a triptych depicting a man in the act of scaling a mountain, seemingly clumsy yet determined to surmount he seemingly tough challenge. The characters in Runo B’s paintings are part of a body of work developed throughout several years, focused on the figure of Fool, the displaced, the common people; always on the edge between marginalization and the bounds of normalcy. Portrayed are characters free of the burden of insanity, yet determined to perform acts of protest - from the smallest to the most extreme - until they are eventually pushed to the margins of society.

 Through strong chromatic contrasts, movements, and repetition in the use of themes and images, Runo B’s paintings invite us to a world inspired by the mad gestures of today’s society and the disjointed facets of the human condition. Cliffhanger is not the final challenge but rather an endless climb the characters attempt to undertake as outcasts, towing the fine line needed to adapt to what the world asks of them, with a sense of naïveté that makes them perpetually graceless.