Fifty years after a small solo show by the English artist organized in Bologna by Studio La Città di Hélène de Franchis, Palazzo Bentivoglio opens its spaces dedicated to exhibitions to a monographic itinerary on Patrick Procktor (1936-2003), an essential but still little known protagonist of the London art scene of the Sixties and Seventies. \n A contradictory and flamboyant figure, Procktor was a Marxist and snob, a homosexual and a father of a family, a traveler to exotic places and a frequent visitor to Venice, managing to trace a seductive and highly personal parable in the field of figuration, from his experimental beginnings, under the guidance of Bacon and Vaughan, to the mutual influences with his partner Hockney, until he soon reached a very recognizable stylistic figure. \n Both in painting and in the privileged medium of watercolor, Procktor was able to charge the traditional genres of portrait and landscape with new and personal tensions, drawing them into autobiography and questioning them, in a constant ironic game between depth of representation and surface values. Intellectual friends, children, fellow artists and lovers pose on the couch in the Manchester Street house, to be captured with sometimes distorting subtleties, while the geography of his travels between London, Italy, Morocco, Egypt and China, is recorded by a vast production of travel sheets, which is first and foremost a sample of very happy formal intuitions and luminous virtuosity. \n The exhibition, which is based on a group of works from the permanent collection of Palazzo Bentivoglio, presents to the public a selection of about sixty works, including paintings, watercolors and drawings, dating from the early sixties to the early nineties, some of which were already exhibited in Bologna in 1972. The title, which comes from a work by Palazzo Bentivoglio, wants to underline the completely peculiar and subjective character of an obstinately figurative research, characterized by great independence, although completely embedded in its time: a portion of the world, like the one — in fact — visible at the opening of a window. \n The loans come mostly from Italian and English private collections and essential was the collaboration of Gabriella Cardazzo of the historic Galleria del Cavallino in Venice, Procktor's friend and merchant in Italy. The Redfern Gallery in London, which has represented the artist all his life, will send an important group of paintings, dated from 1964 to 1989, while two large watercolors from 1969 will arrive on loan from Osborne Samuel. \n In fact, the second room of the exhibition will be entirely dedicated to the production on canvas, where it will be possible to follow the artist's evolution from the Baconian Lovers (1963), a private Italian collection, to the surprising Vedette Pont Neuf, Paris in 1989, which seems to anticipate certain trends in today's young figuration, passing through the iconic Gervase I (1968), the first of a long series of portraits dedicated by Procktor to the young lover Gervase Griffith, an aspiring rocker and his model for two years. The works will be set up on metal structures designed by the artist Davide Trabucco, who designed the exhibition. \n In the first room, on the other hand, works will be exhibited that tell the story of the London experienced by the artist in the Sixties and Seventies, between public figures and private affections. On the walls, portraits of friends such as the stylist Ossie Clark, the interior designer Christopher Gibbs and the director Derek Jarman will alternate, with those of more institutional clients such as Lord Montague or Count Amherst, and those still with adopted children. At the entrance, a cage structure by Davide Trabucco will present a watercolor by Procktor, which represents a pair of Picasso vases portrayed in the house of his friend Cecil Beaton, combined with the same two Picasso vases from the Palazzo Bentivoglio collection: a sort of initial business card for the artist, able to hold together the more traditional aesthetic world of Beaton and that of the younger Jarman. \n In a side room, a screen will show two scenes from A Bigger Splash (1973) starring Hockney and Procktor, a brief appearance by Jarman as Procktor in Stephen Frears' film Prick Up Your Ears (1987) and an excerpt from the documentary about the 1988 artist My Britain. \n The long series of works in the third and last room will finally bring the chronology to the early nineties. Along with some London works, there will be mostly watercolors dedicated to friends, including Italians, and to travels, with the particularly important presence of large sheets dedicated to Venice, a beloved and frequented city, a lighting challenge, but also a subject that Procktor — with humor equal only to contempt — willingly returned to developing even from the basement of his house on Manchester Street.
