There are artists whose work fills rooms with noise, color, urgency — and then there are artists like Domenico Ventura. His paintings don’t seek attention. They wait. They linger quietly, like something glimpsed in a dream you can’t quite forget, or a song half-remembered from childhood. With Before darkness falls, opening on July 3, 2025, in the solemn Sala dei Cannoni of Rocca Paolina in Perugia, Ventura's vision returns to us — vivid, unrelenting, and painfully intimate.

Ventura, born in 1942 in Altamura and passed away in 2021, occupied a unique and somewhat solitary position within contemporary Italian painting. He did not belong to movements, nor did he court the spotlight. He seemed to exist just outside the noise of the art world, building instead a private, often disquieting mythology through images. His work was shaped by a deep internal rhythm, one that resonated with satire, tenderness, resistance, and myth. Part of his artistic formation took place in Umbria — a region that, with its layered histories, mystical stillness, and lingering ghosts of saints and rebels, seemed to mirror the spiritual tone of his painting.

The exhibition unfolds as a sequence — over thirty works, all in the same format, arranged not as static objects but as living presences. These are not portraits, nor allegories in the conventional sense. They are apparitions, visitations from some liminal realm between sleep and awareness. Ventura’s figures emerge with distorted grace: eyes widened by astonishment or despair, bodies caught in moments of ecstatic imbalance, symbolic objects scattered like the remnants of a forgotten rite. Their grotesquery is never grotesque for its own sake. It is a poetic distortion, a way of touching a truth more intimate than realism can reach. These paintings don’t illustrate — they haunt.

Ventura’s iconography is stubbornly personal yet strangely universal. His faces are familiar not because we recognize them, but because they resemble how we feel in our most vulnerable moments. Anxiety, wonder, shame, play, eroticism, and sacredness all coexist on the same canvas. Some figures seem to laugh; others stare blankly as if caught in the midst of revelation or collapse. It’s hard to know what’s happening exactly — and that ambiguity is the point.

And then, there is the space. Rocca Paolina is not a neutral white cube. Built in the sixteenth century under Pope Paul III to affirm papal dominance over the rebellious city of Perugia, it is a fortress layered with meaning — a place that breathes conflict, memory, resistance, and control. The Sala dei Cannoni, with its vaulted stone ceilings and cold architectural severity, doesn’t simply host Ventura’s paintings: it reacts to them. It echoes them. It holds them like a body holds a ghost. Ventura’s imagery, saturated with ambiguity, tension, and dark lyricism, finds a perfect resonance within these walls. What was once a site of power becomes a space of reverie, disobedience, and radical tenderness.

There is something almost cinematic in the experience of the show — a visual choreography that resembles a film never made. Each canvas is a still frame from an inner narrative, a flickering moment between waking and sleep. Ventura does not give us stories with beginnings and ends. He gives us fragments. Emotions suspended. Rituals half-remembered. Dreams interrupted by the cruel light of day. The paintings are all the same size — a decision that reinforces the feeling of cinematic rhythm, like frames in a forgotten reel. As you walk through the sequence, you feel more like a character in a film than a viewer in an exhibition.

The title Before darkness falls is not merely poetic — it names a specific state of perception. That moment of dusk when the outlines of things begin to dissolve, when familiar forms grow strange, when time itself seems to hesitate. It is the hour when children grow silent and dogs bark at shadows, when the mind loosens its grip and imagination begins to overtake logic. Ventura’s practice belongs entirely to this liminal realm. His is not an art of clarity or confession. It is an art of suggestion, of veiled truths and emotional palimpsests. To stand before his works is to stand at a threshold — between what we know and what we fear we have forgotten. His visual vocabulary, while deeply personal, resonates with broader cultural echoes. One might think of David Lynch’s sense of the uncanny, where the banal and the surreal bleed into each other. Or of Lucio Dalla’s nostalgic melancholy, the way he sang about time and memory like they were secret lovers. Or of Fellini’s carnivalesque grotesque, where the sacred and the absurd kiss under a circus tent. There are affinities, yes, but no clear lineage. Ventura doesn’t follow: he wanders. He listens to silences. He paints what refuses to be fully seen.

Perhaps what is most striking about Ventura’s work is its emotional ambiguity. It doesn’t tell you how to feel. It gives you space to feel. And in that space — often uncomfortable, often beautiful — something happens. A recognition. A tremor. A sense that what you’re seeing is not outside you, but within. Ventura’s paintings function like mirrors that distort and clarify simultaneously. They do not offer solutions, only reflections — and in doing so, they restore to us something rare in contemporary art: the right to remain uncertain. In an age where much of contemporary art leans toward the declarative, the visible, the loud, Ventura’s quiet intensity feels radical. His paintings do not assert; they await. They are not declarations but invitations — to doubt, to wonder, to dream otherwise. In this sense, Before darkness falls is more than a tribute. It is a call to slowness, to inwardness, to the kinds of looking that take time — and courage.

As the visitor walks through the Sala dei Cannoni, the paintings become less like objects and more like shadows cast by the mind. Each image opens onto another, not in linear progression but in emotional reverberation. The sequence is not narrative but affective. By the end, one doesn’t leave the exhibition so much as return from a journey. A journey into the self. Into the soft, flickering edge of consciousness. Into that hour before darkness — when the eye no longer trusts the world, and the soul begins to see.

Before darkness falls is not just an exhibition. It is a passage. A rite of looking and remembering. A space of surrender to the mystery of what art can still do: disturb, enchant, unmoor, and, just before the light disappears, offer a kind of grace.