From June 5 to October 19, 2025, the Spazio Cielo at MUSEC – Museum of Cultures in Lugano hosts ELOGIA MMXXV, the latest solo exhibition by Mr. Savethewall, the artistic alias of Pierpaolo Perretta. A visual and poetic reflection intertwining art history, personal memory, and urban language, the show transforms the museum into a contemporary portrait gallery.
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A Bridge Between the Renaissance and Street Art
The exhibition title is a direct tribute to Paolo Giovio’s Elogia, a 16th-century humanist known for his collection of over 400 portraits of illustrious men. Mr. Savethewall revisits this model through a contemporary lens: 38 portraits of modern and contemporary artists (from Frida Kahlo to Lucio Fontana, from Andy Warhol to Kara Walker), plus a self-portrait, all executed with spray paint and stencil on canvas—tools inherited from Street Art, here reimagined within a painterly and museal context.
Each work is accompanied by an elogium, a short poetic text co-written with Francesco Paolo Campione, director of MUSEC, which guides the interpretation and enhances its symbolic and personal meaning.
Silhouettes as Inner Mirrors
The faces are not visible: they are black silhouettes, visual enigmas that play on the recognizability of details and the strength of archetypes. A red flower in Frida’s hair, a shark for Damien Hirst, the red slash of Fontana. Identity is revealed through clues, entrusted to graphic and iconic elements, while black dominates, evoking both absence and potential.
The artist’s self-portrait closes the exhibition, standing against The Magic of Language (2023), a canvas filled with letters that reflects his concern with language as a form of resistance to today’s communicative impoverishment.
An Artistic Path Born in the Streets, Matured in the Gallery
Pierpaolo Perretta began signing as Mr. Savethewall in 2013, when he left his job to fully embrace his artistic path. Opposed to defacing public property, he began attaching painted cardboard panels to walls using tape labeled “SAVETHEWALL”—a way to respect the wall without giving up the message.
From there, his ascent was swift: exhibitions, installations, provocations like the Manifesto of the End of Street Art (2018), and the ongoing collaboration with Deodato Arte, the gallery that has represented him since 2017.
Art, Poetry, and Memory
ELOGIA MMXXV speaks to the present while rooted in history. It is a gallery of soul and art, a mosaic of values, a visual and textual atlas that questions the role of the artist today.
“The artists I portrayed represent myself and my world,” writes Perretta.
And each silhouette seems to say that the most powerful art is the one that hides, suggests, and evokes—leaving the viewer the task of completing the face.