Francesco Cervelli (Rome 1965) uses painting as a tool for a dense reflection on the 20th century from birth to dearth, and at the same time an in-depth investigation of his own personality. Adopting a rigorous methodology for identifying, researching and recreating his iconographic sources, the artist thus established a dialogue with the symbolic ideologies and images of the past century in painting cycles with combine portraiture with landscapes and interiors. This creative process began and came full circle with his Emergenti cycle, portraying many leading figures in philosophy, politics and the arts who in various ways anticipated, influenced, marked and transformed the 20 century: from Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, Foucault, to Churchill, Van Gogh, Picasso, Duchamp, D’Annunzio and Pasolini. Accompanying the portraits are metaphorical forests and places marked by the presence of these important figures: Freud’s study, D’Annunzio’s Vittoriale, Picasso’s atelier. Like the portraits, these works hang in the balance between a sense of r eturn from the darkness of the past and a vision of extr eme dissolution, between fragility and r ebirth, indicated by the presence of that liquefaction used by the artist in his work as a symbolic element, an allusive tool which remains open to doubt and the potential dialectics of interpretation.