When I first saw Alberto Porro’s paintings of arcane symbols against decorative backgrounds, my millennial-addled brain erroneously assumed they were derived from tarot cards. Instead, these are trenchant renderings of various and sometimes obscure European playing cards whose specific meanings and histories have lent themselves to years of engagement for Porro in his exhibition Settebello. Scopa is a popular Italian card game, the artist’s native country, with forty cards divided into four suits: cups, coins, swords, and clubs with various values and face cards. While the meaning of each card feels inscrutable to an unfamiliar audience, especially given that they float in front of multiple backgrounds at different scales, they begin to leave a sense of purpose when viewed as a whole.

Seven identical floating coins, dispersed in three rows of two and one sole coin on top, feature neutral, linear red faces and decorative, geometric yellow and black borders. Settebello (2024) derives these serial images from the most valuable card in Scopa, the Seven of Coins. To Porro, the Settebello embodies great fortune, spurring a network of relationships between these card-inspired paintings. In Tre di bastoni (2023), Porro scales up his painting and places a tiny card depicting the three clubs from Scopa levitating against a white decorative background. A grotesque, yellow head bunches the green and clubs together. The card in this massive white void evokes the antithesis of the Settebello—unease at unknown futures.  

The nearly extinct game of Cuckoo (also Cuccù or Cucù) inspired several other card-based imagery in the show. These specific cards are even more reminiscent of tarot decks, but their meaning is more obscure. The Cuckoo cards present an entropic reality; the meaning eventually disperses from these cards as time progresses, vanishing simply by being played less. However, even if lost, all things made visible had meaning. These images once held a fixed purpose; even if that’s lost in the future or present, their past creation can never be undone. Looking up at the gallery’s ceiling, four grinning paintings of mildly deranged-looking joker figures stare down at you.

The images are taken from Swedish Kille card decks as Blaren cards and are traditionally the lowest value. The unsettling choice to put them staring down at us heightens the range of emotions that the imagery and history that these cards carry.

There is a dichotomy where Porro isolates the graphic element of the card, or the whole card appears on top of the image as a floating object in space. Regardless, most of the paintings have richly rendered backgrounds. One might be a decorative motif like the wooden inlay of a wall, another a metal door and keyhole, or even the dark, wispy silhouette of a tree against a day-end-dark-blue sky. The juxtaposition between the symbols, cards, and backgrounds is meticulously rendered for a sumptuous effect. In contemporary painting, there are so many garish, sloppy canvases that it’s easy to forget the pleasure of seeing something with an uncanny level of exactness and control that evokes movements like Surrealism and Precisionism.

Each piece by Alberto Porro is everything I want in painting. They teem with the artist’s obsession without being overstated. The paintings sometimes hover close to trompe l’oeil territory, adding to their mystique, but there is never deception present, only an intimate, uncertain truth.

— Bryan Martin

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Alberto Porro (b. 1986, Milan, Italy) is an artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, who investigates painting through a blend of mimesis and image appropriation. In his work, he merges imagery from his surroundings with archival materials, particularly historical playing cards, which he researches and studies as part of his practice. By recontextualizing these cards within the pictorial space, Porro crafts visual narratives that weave memory and archetypal imagery, encouraging self-reflection and open-ended interpretations.

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