Have you seen Matteo Garrone’s last picture?

The storyboard of Pinocchio, with the scenes and the word “fine” in the last box, had already done so at the beginning of the elementary schools and, passing in front of the exhibition that collects his works in Bologna, Matteo Garrone It’s sure: “I did the best things then.” Seeing the exhibition, you can certainly say that there was already a lot of the director in the child and in the painter.

At the Modernissima Gallery, the exhibition can be visited from 10 April Before cinema paintingwhich collects the paintings painted by Matteo Garrone, with the contribution of the scenographer Giancarlo Basili in the preparation. The regisita thus tells his experience at the inauguration: “I thought the time had come to show these paintings, after almost 30 years that, in the interviews I do when I present my films, I say:” Before I was a painter, before I was a painter, before I was a painter “. What prompted me to dust off my pictorial works is The thought that people who loved my films could be intrigued to see where I started fromwhat is my training ».

Walking in the room, the cinema is evident. In children’s designs, but also in the most adult works that stop in 1996. There are characters who return to Matteo Garrone’s films and he himself indicates them: friends who made the actors, people who were inspiration. The same works have a cinematographic form: there are frames and close -ups, sequences and movement. Garrone was a great spectator in the cinema in his painter years.

“There is a staging, there is a job on the composition, a job on light. They are all fundamental phases that an artist crosses in search of his gaze and that they then proved to be decisive in my path as a director ». A path born then. «I found myself, at 26, to look for bricks material to do a work that is exhibited here. I went around looking for these bricks, in the Roman countryside, and there I came across a surreal atmosphere, with these Nigerian prostitutes, with these bright colors, populated by cyclists, peasants, retirees, in short, an atmosphere hit me and that, a few months later, it became my first short film. I said to myself: “Let’s see a bit like I find myself with a new form of expression that allows me to move, so I don’t have to concentrate on one frame only, but I have the opportunity to have 24 frames per second”. At that time I worked in a pub. I am a self -taught. I’ve never done cinema schools ».

That self -produced short won the first short film festival by Nanni Moretti. “This certainly helped me, he gave me self -esteem and since then I have no longer painted.” However, explains Garrone that he does not miss it, while not closing the door to a return to this art in the future. «I am sure to do it through the cinema that is an art form that contains many others, including certainly painting. I have always said that I trained by walking around the museums around the world, being a painter. Then I also had the good fortune of having a father who was a theatrical critic and the theater is seen in the paintings I made ».

The director’s pictorial works had never been exhibited. “I feel that these paintings are protected by this wonderful room.” The exhibition was born next to a retrospective of Matteo Garrone’s films, the last four (The story of the stories, Dogman, Pinocchio, I happen) brought to 35mm film, to be better preserved, thanks to the work of the Cineteca di Bologna and to Turin Cinema Museum which hosts another exhibition at the same time:14 snapshots taken on the set: Seydou and Moussa’s journey. Photo from the set of I captain On the historical gate of the Mole Antonelliana from 16 April to 29 June 2025.

Greta de Lazzaris

“Impossible to pitch Matteo Garrone,” says the director of the Bologna film library Gian Luca Farinelli, “but we can say that it is the most surprising Italian filmmaker. Each of his film is a world in which curiosity coexist towards reality and ability to recreate it with an original and powerful gaze. A work that also confronts the great unresolved knots of our country, capable of telling the last, isolates, without moral judgments, with a care of the image that is never only form, but expressive substance ».

The care of the image comes from painting: it is evident in the faces that emerge from the works on display, almost all made on recycled materials, all with a great work on color, “a natural inclination to color” starting from Giant with the three theaters Designed at seven years, all in some way “moving”. In the center of the room there is the last one that has remained for thirty years in a lot. Has as its title The shattered woman. “He had practically exploded for the wind at the first exposure and is almost more beautiful after, rebuilt, with the tragedy he brings.” There is editing and he feels a little more in front of a movie.