CURA.

For his second solo exhibition at Ermes Ermes, Nicola Pecoraro presents a new body of sculptures and drawings that articulate an enigmatic urban imagery. His latest sculptures are assemblages of found objects — often plastic toys and souvenirs — reshaped and cast in bronze. Fake shimmering fruits, toy gladiator armour, and other tourist trinkets are combined into hybrid bodies. Drawing from the mass-produced, kitschy aesthetic of Roman memorabilia that fills the city’s tourist bazaars, Pecoraro constructs an interplay between the sublime and the caricatural, reimagining contemporary ruins, technological fragments, and consumerist artefacts.

These objects, once emblems of commodification, are transformed into ambiguous sculptural forms with a decadent and theatrical appearance. In this process, playful manipulation collides with the banal mass-produced object and the weighty tradition of bronze sculpture. The commercialized souvenir becomes a symbol of a world in perpetual decay and regeneration, where forms and objects rise from their own spectral traces.

This mapping and deconstruction of the everyday extends into drawing, a fundamental medium in Pecoraro’s practice. His drawings are gestural automatisms — marks generated through spontaneous movement of hand and thought. Layers of impulsive signs are later scanned and transferred onto paper, resulting in degraded reproductions of the original. What remains is a ghost image: a multiplied, fragmented reality distilled into black and white. Details dissolve, traces vanish, and an underlying presence is suggested — paper becomes a space of evanescence.

Through drawing and sculpture, Pecoraro rewrites the ordinary, subverting the function of objects in time and perception. His works reclaim weight, materiality, and visibility for overlooked or marginal things, transforming them into unstable scenographies. By reframing images and narratives, he ascribes new meaning to the objects and settings of an urban phantasmagoria—remnants of a world both exhausted and absurd, yet seductive and elusive.

Text by Ilaria Monti