Two young people hug and kiss on a Lambretta, but the boy's limb seems to extend into the menacing armed arm of a terrorist behind them. A lady walks a funny little dog with polka dots that matches the leopard-print coat of another lady who crosses her coming in the opposite direction, but this lady has a tear that tears her body and reveals a bright red writing: it is the unmistakable written by Coca Cola and it too is only an advertising image. They are two paintings from the "Metropolitan Landscape" series, by the Salento painter Giovanni Korallo, integrated into an exhibition which, despite the monothematic title, Tangos, superimposes the author's two most recent parallel obsessions: the Argentine dance, in fact, but also the city streets always seen with the eye of the former Pop Art militant. Thus the reality that walks down the street (on four or two legs) mixes and merges with its photographic reproduction of the road signs that make up the most common figurative horizon in our urban landscape. Korallo's painting, at least in this recent phase, testified by an exhibition that was already seen in Lecce last year, at the Conservatory of Sant'Anna, and that from 15 to 27 May plays away from home, on display at Lisbon in the halls of the Italian Cultural Institute is a "long focal length" painting, like Almodòvar's cinema, which crushes objects and people on the bottom leaving few escape routes to the depth of field. A painting in which the animate and the inanimate can mingle and overlap, but man never loses sight of, indeed, he is always (s) the main object of a figurative composition that does not dwell in descriptions, that does not contemplate boundless landscapes and, when he contemplates them, he does not allow himself to be too softened by them. Korallo claims a non-regionalist painting, a painting without uncovered roots, the kind that is easy to label and clear through customs with a trademark of controlled origin. The thread of the horizon of its countryside has no dry stone walls, but is crossed by the nervous lines of the bodies of more or less improbable tango dancers - now energetic, now sleepy, crushed by the weight of imaginable passions, those of all time - that the their author has learned to observe, he confesses, thanks to digital television channels. And where were these metropolitan landscapes of him immortalized? They could belong to Lisbon (a city never seen before this occasion) or to Lecce, even when the title says: "Street of New York" (from Magritte onwards we have learned to be suspicious, between an image and its caption there is always someone who is lying). They certainly belong to a universal idea (even if anything but abstract) of the city, who knows if more utopian or more dystopian, more bewitching or more terrifying. Psychological repercussions, these, which will always depend on the beholder, because the menacing air of the faces of men and women that we see in Fly with me (a painting in which the shadows of the characters rebel against their respective bodies like black souls of the damned) could be only apparent and deceptive, just like the stewardess's reassuring smile on yet another billboard posted on the long wall that crosses three-quarters of the drawing and blocks our frustrated attempt to look beyond. What is certain is that the big city continues to be everything and the opposite of everything. Sprawling, she has the poisonous hair of the Medusa and still petrifies those who deserve a look