Exhibition text · 2025 “What characterizes the practice of Luca Petti is his use of sculpture as a means to reflect on the living element and to imagine organisms that intertwine animal and vegetal components. This condition of interspecies hybridization—scientifically definable as endosymbiosis—gives rise to living beings that coexist in unpredictable configurations, as remnants of a past era or as entities inhabiting a dystopian, post-human future. The artist comments: “With the title Endosymbionts, I refer to plant species that merge with elements from the animal kingdom, where predatory and instinctive characteristics—linked to defense and survival—coexist within a single body. That is, animals living within other animals, species existing inside other species, in a continuous dialectic of mutual benefit.” Each endosymbiont thus becomes a paradigm of interspecies hybridization and temporal nomadism, manifested through a precise ostensive strategy: like natural specimens, the works are presented according to a rigorous scientific museographic framework. This display system becomes an integral part of Petti’s research—not only the physical placement of sculpture in space, but a theoretical act of staging a new species.” “L’istinto ha preservato la mia specie”, La Santissima, Naples

Marta Ferretti · 2022 “In a saline environment that has been desertified due to climate change, Precipitazioni sotto il livello del mare (Precipitation Below Sea Level), Luca Petti’s solo exhibition in the Careof space (Milan), presents the artist’s most recent research on the hybridisation between the animal and vegetable worlds and on the evolutionary paths that have been created since the Anthropocene. Starting from the consideration that organic, inorganic elements and technology are the foundations of our era, Petti analyses the transformations of matter to raise awareness of the survival conditions of the planet, which are increasingly endangered by human action. His is a nature that has become extreme, where humans, due to their own action, have disappeared. In its place roam a series of organisms that have reconstituted themselves in unexpected forms and functions in order to survive. A dystopian bestiary that takes shape from the earth’s original conditions, when, millions of years ago, the waters of the Mediterranean almost completely evaporated leaving a dry, deep basin. Petti populates this environment - consisting only of saline sediments - with new imaginary beings that, rebelling against human hegemony, manage to coexist in their diversity.” “Precipitazioni sotto il livello del mare”, Careof, Milan

Marta Ferretti · 2022 “Processi di domesticazione espansa (Processes of expanded domestication) presents the results of the research conducted by the artist in the botanical collection of the Museum of Natural History in Verona and the period of residence, flanked by students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Verona, at Villa Verità Fraccaroli in San Pietro di Lavagno, Verona. Borrowing the control stations on stilts used in the past to monitor vineyards and ecosystems in the area - from wild plants to animals - the artist subverts the traditional hierarchy of power that sees human beings at the top and builds a new device inhabited and directed by hybrid creatures. The installation of innocent tubes - patinated through the process of tropicalisation of the metal - in fact hosts an unprecedented ecosystem on its summit: organic-shaped elements made in aluminium are presented as wrappings, powerful and at the same time fragile armatures capable of restoring stability to an earth caught in the grip of change. Here a series of sculptures take their place, the result of the union of animal and plant forms with anthropised characters found in the Roman bas-reliefs of Villa Verità Fraccaroli.” “Processi di domesticazione espansa”, Museo di Storia Naturale, Verona

Letizia Mari · 2022 “Materia Esotica (Exotic Matter) is the title of the project on show in the spaces of Contemporary Cluster, Palazzo Brancaccio (Rome). The combination of these two words, loaded with meanings, identifies the latest research nucleus of the artist who has made the hybridisation of the animal and vegetable world his main area of study. But the artist goes further by revealing, through a skilful aesthetic machine, the modifications imposed by humans on the organisms that make up the planet: plants, animals, soil, air, fruits, are just some of the elements “uprooted” from their own cycle and inserted, grafted into a hyper-productive and performing machine at the service of the anthropocene. So it is that the effects of the changes imposed over the years spill over like a wave onto the precarious condition of human life. We are faced with a nature that is other, altered, fascinating and toxic at the same time, where organisms reconstitute themselves and rebel against human hegemony, regrouping in ancestral but contextually unusual forms. The Siphonophiri, at the centre of Petti’s most recent research, provide an aesthetic and functional canon on the forms proposed: different elements that seal a pact of life, cohabiting and coexisting in their diversity to form a single, interdependent being.” “Materia Esotica”, Contemporary Cluster, Palazzo Brancaccio, Rome

Edoardo De Cobelli · 2021 “The works of ‘Starry speculative night’ express the attraction that the cosmic void arouses in us, a field of enquiry in which it is possible to think of a world far removed from an anthropocentric logic. This speculative horizon is what Eugene Thacker calls the world-without-us. A negative metaphysics where thought constantly turns towards its limits, towards the threshold where positive knowledge turns into negative knowledge. In the night that falls over the space, the work of Luca Petti (Benevento, 1990) instead diffuses the glow of bismuth, a metal that covers the sculpture of a kiwano, a fruit cultivated in the Ligurian territory. This fruit is wrapped by the artist in an iridescent surface, an envelope of toxic colours that enhances the fragility of the climbing plant, giving it a character of extraneousness and luminescence.” “Starry Speculative Night”, Spazio Volta, Bergamo

Letizia Mari · 2021 “Every year, shark finning, the practice of removing the fins of sharks in most cases still alive, generates a very lucrative market. The animal, having undergone one or more mutilations, is thrown back into the sea and unable to swim effectively, sinks to the bottom. “Nel tentativo di tornare a nuotare” (In an attempt to swim again) is the sculptural project that looks at the mutilated limb, at the removed part that feels the call of the phantom body. It is matter that gives itself new legs, prostheses to return to the structure to which it belongs. A utopian journey perhaps, but at the same time a necessary action to take for the survival of the species. What is shown is a hybrid body that is generated under adverse circumstances: a metal figure made of aluminium, bionic.” “Nel tentativo di tornare a nuotare”

Elena Castiglia · 2021 “Luca Petti presents works in the exhibition that are the synthesis of a transition between the animate and the inanimate, between natural forces and their static nature. What looks like protection, in some cases aggressive, turns out to be a docile mantle of structures that hybridise the animal and plant worlds. The use of bright and attractive primary colours, as in the Symbiotic Relationships series, refer to a natural world from which we are increasingly distancing ourselves to the point of barely recognising it. In Albina crestata the artist gives new life to extremely rare beings that in their formal mixture take on enigmatic characteristics, hinting at a knowledge once again poised between what appears and what is. The artist’s interest in the complex relationship between human beings and the environment, expressed in the different declinations of the Anthropocene, presents itself in a delicate manner, initially imperceptible but as an exercise in attention and care. His control of materials is achieved through complex techniques that, as in the paintings in the exhibition New Solution, leave the forms free to decide their own space and create a fluid composition.” “Incontri Sensibili”, Villa Contemporanea, Monza