Luca Ceccherini
Grammelot
First solo exhibition in France by the Italian painter Luca Ceccherini (born in 1993). Grammar is among the languages that precede grammar. Popularized by Dario Fo (1926–2016), winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature, in his masterpiece Mistero Buffo, it is a mixture of sounds, rhythms, and gestures—drawn from the tradition of the giullari, the jester-jugglers of medieval Italy—that says everything without naming anything, without rules, without a dictionary. No rules, no dictionary, and yet immediate comprehension. Luca Ceccherini’s painting functions in the same way.
Grammelot brings together a collection of previously unseen works in which Ceccherini evokes the world of the giullari, the figures of the commedia dell’arte, and the landscapes of his Tuscan childhood. Acrobats, jesters, tightrope walkers, silhouettes emerging from the popular imagination: these figures inhabit the canvas like archetypes, familiar without being identifiable, anchored in a long time that overflows into the present.
Ceccherini trained in theater before dedicating himself to painting—and this initial tension is evident in every canvas. His figures do not seek to illustrate: they occupy space with the physical presence of the actor, inhabiting the surface with the same density as the tree trunks and forest edges that surround them. Just as Fo drew upon medieval folk tales to give voice to those ignored by official history, Ceccherini works with a silent collective memory—not to preserve it as in a museum, but to breathe new life into it through painting.
