“When I first created the series Gesti Tipici in 1961, my aims weren’t to be a painter but to study the psychological impact of authoritarian attitudes perceived on the shadow by peripheral vision. Because such attitudes were typical of politicians, I used politicians as models. I found them in newspapers and magazines.”
J ohn Fitzgerald Kennedy is an exceptional example of Sergio Lombardo’s Gesti Tipici series. A key figure in the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, Lombardo engaged with the visual language of mass media, constantly working to strip his subjects down to their most essential forms. Here, JFK is rendered as a stark black silhouette, a figure of authority and command, devoid of individual features. The painting captures a moment of political rhetoric—an outstretched hand, a decisive gesture. By reducing the image to a high-contrast, near-abstract form, Lombardo highlights the way political figures are mediated, reproduced, and consumed in the public imagination.
The work belongs to a broader exploration of Gestalt psychology and its implications for art, questioning how viewers interpret and assign meaning to simplified forms. In the present piece, the American president, one of the most photographed and mythologized figures of his time, becomes an emblem of power. The painting’s flat, binary structure reflects the visual economy of propaganda and mass communication, where recognition is immediate but meaning is fluid. Lombardo’s approach is both analytical and conceptual—rather than depicting Kennedy as an individual, he isolates the mechanisms by which he is seen, remembered, and ultimately mythologized.
