Room 22

It is finally June. With summer everything looks bright. My eyes are magnifying glasses; light, colours, flowers, scents, things, people, friends, they make me feel good. This project collects all these emotions in a “sowing and constellation” of colour. Hurray!
Davide Nido

No complacency, no concession to skill, no relaxation. The knots are not the refined and numerous ones of silk, the tones are not caressing and selected, but the result is effective. And Nido’s work is precisely in the name of effectiveness. The question he raises is simple and definitive: given a small number of elements, which allow a limited combinatorial calculation, to obtain results that contrast the successes of the digital, technological, advertising and splatter image. Again: starting from the minimum, in terms of raw material, to achieve the maximum, in terms of aesthetic and emotional impact. It is a definitive question because, on whether or not it is resolved, depends the very meaning of art in the age of the reproducibility and technical simulation of everything, even life. Nido’s work is a hope. Also because he paints without painting. Davide Nido stands out in the contemporary scene for his isolation, for the uniqueness of his research. If you want to catalogue his work, you necessarily have to proceed by exclusion. It is not classical abstractionism […] because the interest in colour is secondary and consequent with respect to that in matter, because the “body” of the work is too present to leave room for a discourse on monochromy, on hatching, on shading; it is not informal […] because there is never any complacency of gesture, and the construction is serial and ordered rather than free and impetuous, even when he chooses to act quickly and under the influence of chance. It is not informal […] because there is never any complacency about gestures, and the construction is serial and ordered rather than free and impetuous, even when it chooses to act quickly and under the influence of chance; it is not optical, since the artist does not want to confuse perceptions but to concentrate on the texture of the work, and uses the interwoven threads and smears to nail the image to the support, and not to create a perennial movement; it is not new figuration because it does not feel curiosity for the body, and prefers to proceed by hiding and erasing the figure rather than seeking it out. The artist always uses the same element, hot glue, fired onto the boards or canvases by special heat guns, to rethink the formal achievements of contemporary research, to experiment whether or not they are compatible with the use of a different, alternative, industrial, futuristic material. He does not do this scientifically, it is not a propositional and directed investigation. He acts on instinct, where he sees possibilities for movement, driven by the desire to explore, to challenge a limit. Or rather, two limits: that of the instrument, glue, never before considered an expressive medium, and that of painting. Paradoxically, Nido is a painter, and a very conservative one. He does not use oil, acrylic or tempera, except for backgrounds, but his obsessions are those of a painter: conquering space, simulating a volume, creating a thickness, interpreting a colour, condensing a story into an image, into a flash.
Maurizio Sciaccaluga

Davide Nido (Milan, 1966 – 2014). In 1993 he had his first solo exhibition at Galleria Eos in Milan. In 1994 he exhibited at the Mellauer Werkstatt Gallerie in Vienna, and in 1995 and 1998 in Genoa: at Galleria Leopardi V Idea and Galleria Andrea Ciani. In 2001 he had three personal exhibitions: Sognare at Spazio Obraz in Milan, Folle in una notte di Primavera (with Federico Guida) at Galleria Roberta Lietti in Como and Roarangiaroncelindavio at Galleria Paolo Majorana in Brescia. In 2003 he exhibited at the Palazzo del Broletto in Como, in 2004 at the Galleria Bonelli Arte Contemporanea in Mantua and in 2005 at the Galleria Carloni Spazioarte in Frankfurt. In 2006 he had a solo show at Galleria Blu in Milan and at Galleria Bonanno Arte Contemporanea in Trento. In 2007 the Gianna Sistu Gallery in Paris hosted the Davide Nido exhibition and in 2008 the Bonelli Arte Contemporanea Gallery in Los Angeles presented Spider Man. He exhibited at the Palazzo Reale in Milan in 2007 and at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome in 2008. In 2009 he took part in the 53rd edition of the Biennale di Venezia exhibiting three works in the Italian Pavilion. In 2009 Davide Nido – Onda Frattale was held at Galleria Roberta Lietti in Como and A Campus Point at Politecnico di Lecco.

Room 21

The work I will present at Giorni Felici is an immediate reference to the title of the exhibition. On entering the house, I felt a familiar sensation. “Familiar” both in the Freudian sense of opposite and, at the same time, synonymous with “disturbing” (heimlich, or “familiar” in German, has a second, more literal meaning, namely “kept at home, hidden”), and in its more common meaning, of something already known to you, experienced, as of a past, recent and perhaps, precisely, serene, “happy”. The contrast between these two sensations, similar and opposite, led me to conceive this work, Sette Giorni (Seven Days). “Seven Days” is a week, the emblem of the cycle of life and nature that begins and ends and begins again uninterruptedly, rising from its own ashes each time. “Seven Days” is also the phrase that Samara Morgan, in Gore Verbinski’s The Ring, whispers over the phone, foretelling the end by her hand. There, too, it is a question of a cycle, of a ‘ring’. And so these seven black collages were born. Black pictures that wrap the room, each one bearing the name of one of the days of the week, and where memories, the serene faces of the past and present, carved into the white of the underlying paper, let themselves be enveloped and caressed by the black of the future and of oblivion.
Andrea Mastrovito

A search for wonder, in reality a restless antenna on the world and our cultural baggage, diluted according to fragile methods and materials devoted to perceptive amazement. Sensitivity towards the contingent, the paper datum and light as ineffable instruments to highlight a practice that is always conceptual: the application of coloured fragments, the painstaking skill of assembling fragments that reveal themselves to be parts of a whole in the overall compositional plan, in which every detail deontologically and physically reconstructs a new reality, imaginative but no less true. The artist crosses the threshold of the two-dimensional datum, using it. The result is pictorial but for suggestion and certainly not for the use of canvas and brush: there is interest in the procedural part, in the activation of a form and the construction of the same according to a simple but not easy logic, childish in the joyful and bricoleur reference. Homo Ludens as a possible propaedeutic answer to our existential fractures? Mastrovito’s perspective is a bird’s-eye view, in perpetual motion between extreme craftsmanship and the actualization of urgent problems, always conducted in a gentle manner. As Derrida, a philosopher who is close to the requests observed so far, states: “A space that can give rise to truth in painting remains to be carved out. Neither internal nor external, this space widens without ever allowing itself to be framed, but it is never out of frame. […] The line attracts and withdraws from itself, it attracts and dispenses with it, from itself. It situates itself.
Andrea Bruciati

Andrea Mastrovito was born in Bergamo in 1978. He now lives between Bergamo and New York. He first exhibited in 2003 at The Flath in Milan. He had three solo exhibitions at Analix Forever in Geneva in 2005, 2007 and 2009. In 2006 and 2008 he exhibited at the 1000eventi Gallery and Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea in Milan, in 2007 at the Palais des Expositions in Brussels, in 2008 at the Jerome Ladiray Gallery in Roue, at the Dior Centre in Paris and at the Italian Academy of Columbia University. The Foley Gallery in New York hosted Black Bag – American Philosophy of Composition in 2008 and Love is a four-letter word in 2009. In the same year he held the exhibitions Enciclopedia dei fiori da giardino at Assab One – Ex GEA in Milan, La Bonne Nouvelle at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Lacoux, and Climat Poetique at the Hotel de Ville in Geneva. He participated in the II Prague Biennale in 2005 and the 15th Rome Quadrennial in 2008. In 2005 he exhibited in the exhibition Beauty is not difficult at the Fondazione Stelline in Milan and then moved to Berlin. In 2009 he held Italian Artists New York at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York and, in the same space, in 2010 he created the installation Speed of a car + flowers. On 5 June 2010 he set up The Island of Dr. Mastrovito in a room at Governor’s Island in New York.

Room 20

“The impetus of the act of setting out, the adventurous daring of expeditions to remote lands, are deceptive as to their motives. Not infrequently, it is simply a matter of avoiding what is around us, because we are not up to facing it. We sense its danger and prefer to deal with other dangers of unknown magnitude”. I like to start with these words of Elias Canetti, because indeed the human spirit often turns towards distant things and neglects everything “against which it is constantly bumping”. The spirit that “slams” into things near, that struggles to avoid them by venturing to other places, believing in this way to silence them, has accompanied me for many years. The spirit that moves away is a rescue, at least I thought it was. All the times in distant places (not only physical), I have always felt a discomfort, a symptom, as if to tell me “this is not your place, go home”. The physical home and the home “inside”. The physical house is easy, the house “inside” has to be rebuilt, dismantled right down to the foundations and put back together again, which took me twenty years. Now I can tell something of my history, my memory, build suitcases and venture towards unknown places. As a guest for eighteen days, in a room on the first floor of the house to which Giovanni Testori loved to return after his “outward journeys”, I like to remember his words: “However, I can assure you that what has always helped me to live and, moreover, to accept life, even in its curse, has always been the return home”.
Rossella Roli

There is no room for souvenirs: the luggage is a survival kit, containing the fantastic necessities for a real journey. Suitcases that are so many bridges to possible worlds, just a step away from our everyday life; they shine with symbols, full of organic references, purple or carmine red hearts and umbilical cords, they are the venous blood full of impurities or the blood that flows like a clear spring from the arteries, marked by feminine blues, supported by glassy aerial transparencies, affirming a hic et nunc that burns any temptation of spirituality. They are an affirmation and yet an open dialogue: active entities, conceived in the unfolding of time, imagined as travelling companions, to be touched, opened, used, broken, manipulated and reinvented. They are survivals: Rossella Roli’s work, unashamedly, divests itself of all vanity and undertakes an ascent towards the summit of the mountain, towards other temporal spaces, into the underworld of memory. In fact, there are no objects unrelated to the action of remembering; they are naturally characterised as time machines. Maternal in their protection against the horror vacui, they are in the first instance reassuring presences, capable of anchoring us to reality, sometimes thaumaturgical. Going beyond the idea that a work of art – particularly one that has to do with sculpture – needs a specific physical place with which to talk, and breaking the golden rule that wants it to be sacred, untouchable, a hieratic element when enveloped in metaphysical fumes, or simply cynical, when it has a more contemporary allure, Rossella Roli’s assemblage, on the other hand, is bold in renouncing a pre-established status, not afraid to be dependent on the user, to become something for everyday use.
Silvia Bottani

Rossella Roli was born in Modena in 1967. She graduated from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts with a specialisation in Visual Arts. She currently lives and works in Milan. She has worked in graphic design since 1989. In 2001 she attended a master’s degree in web design at the Domus Academy in Milan. After participating in several group exhibitions, in 2009 she held two solo shows in Milan: Porzione di mare che sale e di cielo che sale che sale at the Blanchaert Gallery and Survivals at the Obraz Gallery.

Room 19

For Giorni Felici the decision was made to go straight into the details: canvases that recall traditional motifs from the Mexican southwest, naturally dyed and woven on hand looms… That provide a backdrop for neon lettering (glacially warm luminosity)… Of the aporia genre… Song texts… Multilingual phrases. Like refined roughness. A conjunction or conjugation of regional, local, ancestral and globalised modernity… As an “almost purely formal exercise”.
Mario Dellavedova

The artist’s style is not easily identifiable, as it is intentionally “deconstructed” in favour of multiple and constructive interpretations. His works, which range over different fields, reach from painting, sculpture and installations to other media, drawing on objects, materials and languages from past and contemporary cultures. These elements are broken down and recomposed, reset and reworked so that they acquire a logical sense or a simple and obvious justification that is not so evident at first glance, especially if they are grouped together and not accumulated. The written word, often used by the artist, is removed from its cultural sphere to be formalised through improbable objects that at the same time characterise its status, offering the spectator a reflection on the role of the artist and the language of art, circumventing its privileges. The play on words, the metaphor, the subtle irony bring us back to a conceptual sphere that purposely contrasts with the sometimes artisanal aspect of the artefacts produced or used and the simplicity of putting them together.
Carlotta Testori

Mario Dellavedova was born in Legnano in 1958. He graduated in architecture and now lives between Taxco in Mexico and Villastanza, in the province of Milan. His works have been exhibited in many museums and galleries in Italy and abroad: in Japan, the United States, China, Mexico, Germany, Austria and Spain. He held his first solo exhibition in 1984 at the Rocca d’Angera. In 1987 he exhibited at the Corrado Levi studio in Milan and at the Guido Carbone Gallery in Turin, in 1987 at the Le Case d’Arte Gallery in Cologne and in 1990 at Le Case d’Arte in Milan, in 1991 at the Galleria in Arco in Turin, in 1992 and 1995 at the Sperone Gallery in Rome and in 1993 at the New York branch of the same gallery. In 1996 he held an exhibition at the Stadtpark Gallery in Krems, in 1997 at the 1000eventi Gallery in Milan and in 2000 the Galleria Mazzoli in Modena hosted two personal exhibitions. In the same year he held a solo show at the Museo de las Artes in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2003 the exhibition And all that remains is founded by poets at the Sperone – Westwater Gallery in New York and in 2004 Domestic lights, domestic flights, domestic delights at the Sprovieri Gallery in London. In 2009 some of his latest works were presented at Galleria Mazzoli in Modena on the occasion of the exhibition ABCD…Benvenuto, Chucchi, Dellavedova.

Room 18

Through upside-down magnifying glasses, two drawings stigmatise the imagery of the “short century”. In a diptych of black Belgian marble, the world’s holy water font, the map of the earth is reflected and flooded with oil, mirroring the ruins of a world that has lost the vertigo of verticality.
Diamante Faraldo

Diamante Faraldo’s works take the form of purified, essential forms: strong presences, the culmination of a path of research through subtraction and absence until they reach the absoluteness of the form, a concentrated, congealed nucleus. They point directly, in a shortened path, towards the unity of the image, towards its absolute character. Faraldo’s forms are born from emptiness, in silence, they are surrounded by it and are nourished by it in their congealed compactness. Proceeding by reductions and subtractions to the pure sign, in the void remain the simulacra, the immaterial aspect of the real. They constitute the elsewhere of the scandal of death. They stand at the threshold between the space of life and that of annihilation.
Eleonora Fiorani

Diamante Faraldo was born in 1962 in Aversa, in the province of Caserta. He attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples and in 1984 held his first solo exhibitions at Castel dell’Ovo in Naples and in Grenoble. In 1986 he moved to Berlin to further his artistic studies and, on his return from Germany, he settled in Milan where he lives and works. In 1991 he exhibited at the Institut Français in Naples, in 1996 at Studio Gennai in Pisa and at Il Cantiere in Venice. In 1998 he held the exhibition Stilleben at the Decidue Arte space in Milan and Contaminazione at the Spazio Mozzilo in Milan. In 2000 he exhibited at Artforum in Merano and at the Fondazione Mudima in Milan. In 2001 he participated in Le Tribù dell’arte at MACRO in Rome and in 2004 he produced Stimmung at Spazio Mudimadue in Milan. In 2006 he had a solo show at the Gianluca Ranzi Gallery in Antwerp and in 2007 at the Nina Lumer Gallery in Milan.

Room 17

A large bourgeois villa near Milan. And in it the abstract presence of Giovanni Testori, the great artist I have always loved. How beautiful to make a gesture in his house, inside one of his rooms. Thoughts for me full of history and memory, words and drawings so much assimilated in the past. Of these games of souls is in fact my space in the Testori house, a tribute by performing a parallel exercise. My stylistic elements on his walls, a shot of understanding with his talking walls, where with colour I try to retrace the spirit of his gestures. And then in the belvedere in a semicircle outside the two windows a cold bronze armchair. Where I hope for a few days Testori will want to stay and meditate, that is, on Testori’s armchair.
Alessandro Mendini

Alessandro Mendini, with his work of interweaving designed painting and pictorial design, correctly places himself in the position of someone who cannot but represent contradiction as a value of artistic creation with other production processes that are subject to instructions before use. The complexity in this case consists precisely in the gentle project of transferring the cooling characteristic of design into the field of painting and the decorative warmth characteristic of design into this. The result is the stripping of a language purified of the hedonism of the material and the ornamental emphasis capable of ennobling the object’s lack of functionality. The operation is valid precisely from the search for a creative balance between the two polarities through the choice of a volubility capable of holding up two different yet converging creative processes. Evidently Mendini has overcome the superstitious pride of the artist as the architect of the world, of the one who has to produce constructive answers to the social demand for a possible order that can be transferred in scale from the perimeter of the work to the wider outside world. Mendini’s operative interweaving involves the assumption of a cross-eyed system of linguistic production always supported by a desire for abstraction of the genres used. Abstraction is achieved precisely through the application of the method of contradiction. Contradiction of linguistic specificity achieved through “designed painting” and “pictorial design”. In this way, we witness a de-structuring of painting and design achieved through the expansion of their possibilities. The extension leads to a loss of boundary, the abstraction of a perimeter of the work that finds its definition through the citation of absolutely contaminating procedures. The transversality formulated by Mendini’s new creative method also implies the assumption of architecture as a vast field of representation, where the architectural module is not a building structure but a scenic tool. In this way we are not faced with the avant-garde hope of a synthesis of the arts as a possible totalising antidote to the partiality of languages and the world.
Achille Bonito Oliva

Alessandro Mendini was born in Milan in 1931.

Room 16

For someone born and raised in Milan like me, Testori is what I have tasted since I was a child. His is a marvellous dialect, a Brianza dialect mixed with Latin, Frenchisms, onomatopoeia, a language that is body, earth, perfumes. Three-dimensional, not flat like the Italian of perfect diction.
Arianna Scommegna

“Cleopatras” is an overwhelming declaration of love, death and life. It is one of the “Tre Lai”, the lamentations for the murdered lover, written by Giovanni Testori in the last months of his life. It is the weeping of the Queen of Egypt, here with the Lombard ending «as», a dialectal sign of enormity, contempt and equivalent to the dialect name of Asso in the Brianza region dear to the author, for his «Gran Tugnàs», Antonio. A woman who expresses herself in Testori’s language, which is more extreme than ever, artificial, born from several languages, living and dead, from dialects, from phonetic variants, impervious, obscure but paradoxically “natural” and “clear” in evoking the violence of passions. Guided by Gigi Dall’Aglio’s careful direction, the talented Arianna Scommegna succeeds in giving voice to this material language and to the emotions that pervade it, making it flesh and blood, and on her white costume with blue, green and red colours she draws the geographical place in which Testori makes her live.
Magda Poli

Arianna Scommegna was born in 1973 in Milan, where she lives and works. She graduated from the Civica Scuola Arte Drammatica “Paolo Grassi” in 1996 and in the same year she founded, with a group of fellow students of the academy, the independent theatre association A.T.I.R., with which she carries out her theatrical activities, organising shows, workshops and festivals. The stable and continuous core of the Association consists of fourteen people including actors, director, set designer, costume designer, organiser and technical staff. The artistic direction is by Serena Sinigaglia. Since 2007, the association has managed the Ringhiera theatre, a space in the southern suburbs of Milan, in Gratosoglio. Among the many productions in which it has been involved, the three monologues performed in the last season stand out: Qui città di M by Piero Colaprico, La Molli (divertimento alle spalle di Joyce) and Cleopatràs by Giovanni Testori. On 5 June 2010, the National Association of Theatre Critics awarded her the Critics’ Prize.

Room 15

I like to look carefully, to observe, to analyse, to anatomise everything that surrounds me. Especially architecture, the city, to walk through, to cross. This is where my subjects come from: they are all places I have observed, crossed in my daily life. Skylight is the hole in Milan’s Central Station, the skylight that plunges from the centre of the square into the metro. Everyone passes by, many see it, but no one knows it is there. I started looking at it because I realised it was there, and I started painting it because I realised how much it contained, in those few metres of emptiness: from the hole, from the metro, you can see the hole itself (its “thickness”) with its red rings, and beyond it you can see the sky with its colours, its greys, its clouds. The square, the Central Station, the Pirelli skyscraper can be glimpsed, peeping out from behind its curves, as if to jump into the hole. And I’m inside: in the glass halfway down the hole the whole city is reflected with its symbols. On the lower level there is the metro, its lights, entrances, subways, shops, turnstiles, stairs, spaces, exits; on the upper level, looking around you can see other spaces, other exits, around the hole; it is a sort of windowsill halfway between the square and the metro from which you can see outside and inside the hole: its open-air underground square, below, traversed by commuters, wet from the rain, drawn by a circle of white snow, when there is one. And once outside, from above, from the square, looking inside, you see its red circles, you sense its perfect geometry, the repetition of the circles, you see more clearly its emptiness, its opening in the middle of the city. A ring surrounds it, preventing us from ending up below. These 210 watercolours are a synthesis of all the things I have seen, observed, crossed, discovered, standing in front of it. Or rather, inside, outside, around… In front.
Emanuele Dottori

Emanuele Dottori creates interior architectural landscapes, where the idea of the place-avatar returns, embodying different ways of being. The pictorial re-elaboration of the skylight in the square in front of Milan’s Central Station is exemplary in this regard: Dottori started from some photos taken with Google Earth and already at this stage managed to humanise the space and make the skylight ambiguously anthropomorphic or at least organic, and in this context it takes on the appearance of a gigantic gaping mouth reminiscent of Star Wars imagery. Finally, the artist moves from re-elaboration to abstraction, seemingly moving away from the virtual physicality of the internet image to an inner, personal vision that nevertheless retains a sense of the humanisation of the place.
Mario Gerosa

Emanuele Dottori was born in Cernusco sul Naviglio in 1983. He currently lives and works in Rome. In 2006 he graduated from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. In 2006 he exhibited Villa Fiorita at the Gheroartè space in Corsico. In 2007 he held an exhibition at the Spazo Oberdan in Castelseprio and in 2009 the personal exhibition Skylight_Disegni at the Sala rossa of the Galleria Ghiggini in Varese. April 2010 saw the conclusion of Skylight_Disegni e Collages at Studio Maffei in Milan.

Room 14

I like old Egyptian films because they remind me of what Egypt was like then and make me think about what it has become today. And I enjoy reading the credits as much as watching the film! From these you can see what a mixture of nationalities and religions existed in Egypt. They show the cultural richness of the country at that time, people loved each other more. You could read the name of a Muslim next to that of a Jew, a Greek next to an Armenian. Our society was very rich and more tolerant.
Youssef Nabil

His starting point is a land of great history, a lost history of which great traces remain, that of the ancient Egyptians, and a history, the Islamic one, which calls for a different model from that, by now successful, of the West: a context that in the end is marginal compared to the Great World, but central in its geo-political sphere, cosmopolitan in its religious and cultural racial multiplicity, shaded by orientalist nuances that are as seductive as ever. The fascination of cinema, like that of the great mythologies of our time, stardom, glamour, like the belief in the perpetuating power of the image, produce in his art a sense of nostalgia for that kind of world and existence that seems to be dizzyingly distant in space and time, to the point of appearing never to have been and never to be. In his art, experience is converted into a desirous longing, an arabesque dream, a memory destined to fade in time. It is precisely memory, then, that appears as a fundamental feature of all his work, a memory that seems to function like the coloured glass that filters light from windows or lamps in mosques and paints their interiors with a phantasmagorical unreality.
Pier Luigi Tazzi

Youssef Nabil was born in Cairo in 1972, to a Greek-Lebanese Christian father and a Muslim mother. As a Christian he converted to Islam at the age of 30. He studied French Literature at Ain Shams University, but his great passion for cinema drew him to photography at a very young age. Between 1993 and 1994 he worked with David La Chapelle in New York and between 1997 and 1998 with Mario Testino in Paris. In 2003 he left Cairo for Paris and currently lives and works in New York. His works have been exhibited in many museums and galleries: Notable venues include the British Museum in London, the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle, the Leme Gallery in São Paulo, Brazil, FotoFest in Houston, Texas, the Centre de Cultura Contemporanea in Barcelona, the Istitut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Seville, the Aperture Foundation in New York and the 53rd Biennale di Venezia. He had three solo exhibitions in Cairo in 1999, 2001 and 2005. In 2005 and 2007 he had two exhibitions at the Third Line Gallery in Dubai. In 2007 and 2008 he exhibited at the Michael Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa. In 2009 he had five solo exhibitions: in Rome at Villa Medici, in Florence at Galleria Poggiali e Forconi, in Berlin at Volker Diehl Gallery, in Dubai at The Third Line Gallery and in Atlanta at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Room 13

A bedroom, the most secret room in the house, where not even the guest is invited to enter, becomes, in the path of these paintings and this installation, the emblem of a universal world, in which freedom and its relationship with power are investigated. In this environment, man remains alone with himself, finally free of all external impositions, abandoned to his intimacy, but destined to succumb to his physical needs and the need for rest. The human being, conceived with the limit of sleep, is here already ready to escape and redeem himself with the imagination and hope of the dream. A room, lit in such a way as to remind the visitor of the lights and shadows of contemporary society.
J&PEG

The J&PEG duo works with serene kleptomania and illustrate attitudes, postures, behaviours and metamorphoses of figures that seem to want to represent an unprecedented theatre of life. Painting, sculpture, photography and installation are put at the service of a staging capable of moving the contemplation of the public out of an exclusive condition of daytime intelligence. Here the scene amplifies the intermediate spaces of aesthetic enjoyment and determines the possibility of affirming with Baudelaire that Beauty is always a promise of happiness. Of course, here beauty is deliberately constructed. It always refers to an elsewhere made possible by technological reproduction, but also corrected by craftsmanship. The coexistence of different media allows an iconography that lives on the borderline between enigma and explicit meaning. Here art seems to confirm an unprecedented vocation, that of being a sort of Mouth of Truth that does not speak to us with ambiguous and obscure sentences, but rather illustrates man’s need to mark psychological and social limits. In order to do this, J&PEG uses the stealthy familiarity that comes to the general public from cinema, photography, theatre and the virtuality of interactive games.
Achille Bonito Oliva

J&PEG are Antonio Managò and Simone Zecubi; they have always worked as a duo. Antonio was born in 1978 in Busto Arsizio and Simone in 1979 in Gallarate. Both graduated from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts: Antonio in Sculpture and Simone in Scenography. They live and work in Milan. In 2006 and 2007 they exhibited at the Obraz Gallery in Milan on the occasion of the group shows Take Five and Lo stato dell’arte. In 2007 and 2008 they participated in Artfirst in Bologna and Miart in Milan, in 2008 in Art Paris and in Rome – The road of contemporary Art. In the same year they held their first solo exhibition Working Mates + Project Room. Ten Second to Midnight at Galleria Poggiali e Forconi in Florence, presented by Achille Bonito Oliva. In 2010 they participated in the (Con)Temporary Art event at Superstudiopiù in Via Tortona, Milan, with a room entitled Natura Naturans.