Il sole come un gatto

Il sole come un gatto is the first institutional exhibition in Naples by Diego Perrone (Asti, 1970). For the occasion, the artist conceived a site-specific project featuring newly produced works for the first-floor salons of Palazzo Caracciolo d’Avellino. The exhibition moves across different languages and media, freely navigating several motifs and formal repertoires from Perrone’s more than twenty-year practice. From moving image to environmental and sound installation, from photography to sculpture, the works on display compose an ideal and synesthetic landscape that seems to portray a fleeting, transitional moment.

A cat, falling from above into a courtyard, adjusts its body mid-descent, its paws curled inward, ready to soften the final impact. The curious and necessary choreography of its body is decompressed in a slow-motion video that gives the exhibition its title. Visible obliquely from all the rooms on the floor, the video alludes to an almost artisanal construction of time. The fragmentation of movement becomes a modular mechanism for constructing action.

The subject—a cat—contains within itself a symbolic stratification that spans eras and cultures, from the sacredness of ancient Egypt to the contemporary proliferation of social media reels. Here it becomes an animot: an alien and feline creature, worldly and cosmic, which in its nudity seems to turn into a reflection or mirroring of something else.

The image is that of a cat in free fall, but it could be any accident, thought, or action that unfolds in an instant: a ray of light resting on a glass chalice and casting unexpected shadows; bubbles filling a glass, as in the sound installation Senza Titolo, 2026. The sculpture Pendio piovoso frusta la lingua, 2026 “describes an intense mountain storm, the heavy rain striking the face like a lash and the fear of continuing toward the summit. The panic that emerges when confronting natural elements in an unprotected setting. […] It is the account of a moment made up of multiple events occurring simultaneously, experienced as a single body yet described one at a time.”

A reiteration of a 2010 sculpture, this silky and virginal body extends majestically like a peacock offended by captivity—monstrous and animal—tracing an unfathomable landscape. The image outruns thought, whips the tongue, as in the descents of Pendio piovoso.

When asked, “What is poetry?”, Jacques Derrida chose the image of the hedgehog: “an animal thrown onto the road, absolute, solitary, curled up within itself.” The poetic gesture is accomplished by renouncing culture without losing it, “crossing the road” with a “learned ignorance.” The poetic attempt crosses the road of grand discourses and risks being crushed by them. “It is that preverbal entity which, while demanding language, simultaneously resists it, poised between withdrawal and crossing, like the hedgehog closed in on itself, exposed to the highway, suspended between stillness and movement.” Like the anthropomorphic animal images of Perrone’s zoopoetics.

Il sole come un gatto is a crossing beneath a sun that is not metaphysical and absolute, but animal, mute, and unfathomable—one that enigmatically condenses, with tenderness and ferocity, space and time into the poetry of a day or of a single moment.

The exhibition was conceived to be part of the third edition of EDI Global Forum, focused on the proliferation of images in the era of the digital infosphere. Diego Perrone’s approach to the image is grounded in the creation of poetic landscapes through a transversal and eclectic language that seamlessly transforms the word into sculptural, video, and photographic work, and vice versa.

His poetics move through images drawn from the animal and rural worlds, from Italian peasant traditions (as in the series of photographs of elderly people holding animal horns and other objects) to cult icons of popular culture and fashion (such as the Armadillo shoes by Alexander McQueen, which inspired I vetri, a series begun in 2013). From carp to geese, from mouflons to cats and alien-like creatures, from the image of an ear to that of a tractor, these characters and figures form historical-symbolic stratifications that narrate the story of Italy over the past thirty years.

From the post-economic-boom periphery to a post-globalized society straddling the digital world, simulacra of capitalism, and dystopian sci-fi imaginaries, the ruins of tradition irrigate this post-folk imagination with vital energy in a horror-inflected key.