Pietro Geranzani. Anteguerra. Avant-guerre. Pre-war. Vorkriegszeit

From June 26, 2025, Palazzo Citterio hosts Pietro Geranzani’s Anteguerra, a work of intense visionary power that reflects on the suspended and restless time that precedes every conflict.

The title of the exhibition – Anteguerra – is a concept charged with disquiet and recognizability: we live, Geranzani seems to suggest, in a perpetual condition of pre-conflict, in an age that deludes itself into thinking it knows peace while silently moving toward new tensions. The triptych, monumental in size, is a symbolic and surreal representation of our time: skeletons, craters, fiery skies, battered bodies and shadows evoke an ancestral, collective, deeply Western imagination.

While adopting a pictorial language close to European Expressionism – Otto Dix, Mario Mafai, but also references to Beato Angelico’s iconic power or Bosch’s visionary nature – Pietro Geranzani never succumbs to rhetoric or moralism. His gaze is lucid, at times prophetic, and leads us into the symbolic void of our present, where war is not an exception, but the rule that structures our history and cultural identity.

Anteguerra is not just a work of art, it is a meditation on Western history, marked by brief lulls between conflicts and illusions of peace. Pietro Geranzani, a European-trained artist – born in London, raised between Germany and Switzerland, and now active in Milan – has exhibited in international contexts including the Venice Biennale, MART in Rovereto, the Saatchi Gallery in London, and numerous spaces in Europe, the United States and Asia.

The exhibition is part of a larger context of reflection that engages the audience in an aesthetic and emotional experience: the viewer is not a passive spectator, but an active part of a narrative that interrogates his or her deep fears, archetypes, and role in the present time.

Anteguerra is a work that does not admonish but evokes. It does not impose interpretations but opens spaces of thought. In this, lies its greatness.