Giulio Noccesi’s exhibition, Fermo per sempre (Stranded in time), at New York Life Gallery, articulates what figurative painting does well. The paintings in the exhibition, inspired by the artist’s native Italy, share soft geometric qualities on highly worked canvases. They render scenes that suggest our experience of reality through painterly form rather than exact mimesis. Here, the compositions fluctuate: they seem totally contrived and impossible, yet the treatment of each also makes them feel immediate and real. 

The press release cites Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities—a novel about a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan that describes 55 fictitious cities—as an influence for the paintings, framing them as a network of isolated yet related scenes, i.e., how the parts make the whole while remaining unique. While this conceptual underpinning frames the paintings’ shared cartography as contingent on an implied sense of place, this throughline is more stylistic than a work of fiction, as suggested by the Calvino reference. Seeing a portrait of two men at a table in the same room near a still life of strawberries does not function in the same way as, say, experimental prose. To imply the presence of a narrative structure through stylistic unity, therefore, seems inaccurate. 

Instead, Noccesi achieves a very assured style as a painter. Landscapes, portraits, scenes, and still lifes of various objects, flowers, eggs, fruits, and fish are all present. These subjects are most successful when placed in bizarre settings. Uova (Eggs) (2025) presents eight eggs in a bowl lined with blue fabric, on a wooden-legged platform, atop a flowered earth, with a stormy background. While many of the paintings feature textured surfaces, the egg shells are remarkably smooth, capturing through paint the distinct tactility of an egg’s exterior. And while the dark clouds and ground also feel familiar, the scene is awesomely random, not really making sense but still totally quotidian. 

When artifice pushes and pulls, the paintings are at their most compelling. Two figures crane their necks up in Aspettando la pioggia (Waiting for the rain) (2025), with a looming cloud, visible beads of rain coming down onto buildings, and rolling mountains in the background. Two trees with upward branches and a red car that looks like they’re about to float upwards into the sky. The exaggerated pose of the two men, the strange car, and the rising motion towards the clouds are simultaneously uncanny and palpable, evoking the sensation of gazing up, sensing the air, and that suspended moment right before the sudden fall of rain. 

Although some paintings take on more mundane subjects, Noccesi’s skill as a painter is present. Leo e Elisa (2025) presents a phenomenal domestic scene of two people embraced in bed over a book: slightly curved blue lines in a vase next to the pair imitate the ripple of the submerged stems. Elisa’s exposed belly sandwiches fleshy tones between shadow. This work affirms Noccesi’s command of representing the experience of our three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface. 

Significantly departing from the rest of the works, Renault Scenic (2024) places a strange, Renaissance-like figure with a bob cut in front of a Renault car with three giant floating apricots on top. Natura morta, castello (Still life, castle) (2024) pulls a similar trick by randomly putting a colorful floating castle in the left-hand corner of a still life composition of fruits. Both works are great and totally hilarious, but they are estranged in the show, sitting somewhat apart from the quieter psychological atmosphere of the surrounding paintings. And while this isn’t a fatal flaw, it defines Fermo per sempre (Stranded in time) as a collection of robust works bound more by mood and sensibility than a singular conceptual system. 

Giulio Noccesi: Fermo per sempre (Stranded in time) is on view at New York Life Gallery from April 3rd to May 22nd, 2026.