Pippo Rizzo and the Sicilian Futurism 

In the panorama of 20th-century Sicilian art, Pippo Rizzo (Corleone 1897 – Palermo 1964) can be considered one of the main links between Palermo and avant-garde culture. He was first a pupil of the Italian painter Ettore De Maria Bergler (a well-known exponent of the Art Nouveau style, who was born in Naples and later settled in Palermo), but it will be for him decisive the trip conducted to Rome, where in 1919 he personally met Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and attended Giacomo Balla's studio. It was during this period that he joined the Futurist movement, contributing to its subsequent spread in Sicily. In 1922 he chose to return precisely to Palermo, a city where, following the model of Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, he founded the Casa d'Arte Futurista inside his residence. Before long, this became a fervent meeting and exchange place for the intellectuals and artists of the time. Through his art Pippo Rizzo theorized and implemented, in a Palermo strongly anchored in traditional taste, a cultural revolution that Futurism had triggered by investing every aspect of human expression. His works took as their model not only the cult of the mechanical-industrial era, but above all scenarios of ordinary life interpreted with an unprecedented form: family scenes, figures of the landscape, dancing silhouettes, natural elements and finally furniture elements were now punctuated by the dynamism given by the plots of lines that, intersecting, determined the formation of the figurations from the new essential and geometric synthesis. He, too, soon directed his attention to the experiments of the typographic page connected to the Paroliberismo, so as to combine with refinement and wise balance characters of different morphology, as demonstrated by the poster of the Marinated Exhibition in Rome in 1929. His work was thus characterized by the aspiration for a total art that invested all spheres of human life, just as the manifestos of the Second Futurism recited and as re-proposed by the latest retrospective in his honor set up in 2018 inside the Pinacoteca della Fondazione Sicilia (Villa Zito), entitled “Pippo Rizzo. Futurist Dialogues.”