Room 11

Pink is a colour that has always belonged to me. It is the colour of tenderness as opposed to the colours of brutality. My work always moves between these two poles: delicacy and violence. But while I immediately felt that violence was one of my expressive characteristics, delicacy emerged with maturity. Even as a young man I felt that pink was a colour that belonged to me deeply, but in those years when I used it I always ended up destroying the work, because I felt that I was not yet ready. I didn’t feel I had the lucidity to use it. Today, however, I feel it is an accomplished way of working on the body.
Alessandro Verdi

His works pierce the veil over the throbbing of life and the abysses of despair, bringing to the surface the traces of a distant memory, archetypal and transversal to the generations, recording the tremors of the flesh, its flowering, its degeneration, listening to the murmur of the cycle of nature and participating in the powerful spectacle of the universe, between the loss of Paradise and the recognition of the human.
Gianluca Ranzi

Alessandro Verdi was born in 1960 in Bergamo, where he lives and works. He was discovered by Giovanni Testori who edited the catalogue of his first solo exhibition in 1987 at the Compagnia del Disegno Gallery in Milan, where he returned to exhibit in 1999 and 2005. He has exhibited in 1993 at the Galleria Bellinzona in Milan, in 1998 at the Galerie der KVD in Dachau and at the Casa dei Carraresi in Treviso, in 2000 at Art’s Events Centro d’Arte Contemporanea in Torrecuso, in 2001 at the Fondazione Mudina in Milan, in 2003 at Villa Pomini in Castellana, in 2004 at Officina arte in Magliaro, in 2005 and 2007 at the Mudimadrie Galerie Gianluca Ranzi in Antwerp. In 2008 he held the exhibitions Alessandro Verdi. Il Paradiso Perduto at the Galleria dell’Artistico in Treviso and Alessandro Verdi. Corpo senza Corpo at the Galleria Blu in Milan, which currently represents him. In 2009 he took part in the 53rd edition of the Venice Biennale with the exhibition Alessandro Verdi: navigare l’incertezza held at Campo della Tana.

Garden

The installation consists of a series of marine steel structures, wheels deformed to resemble prickly pear pallets, which are set against a supporting structure made of corten steel, representing the trunk of the fig tree itself. The trunk itself is made up of a series of masks with deformed features. The viewer is presented with a multiple impression: from time to time one observes the wheels in their impossible movement, constrained in their irregular frames, like donkey ears, or the rusty masks stand out, and finally, as a whole, one observes the entire vegetal structure of the plant. One of the characteristics of the prickly pear plant is that it can reproduce not only sexually but also by budding, it can multiply by simple spontaneous division, through the leaves, by cloning its own cells. And so, just as my work has always been a research into the spasmodic and obsessive multiplication of the identical, so I find in the way the prickly pear plant reproduces itself the similar paroxysmal and persecutory mechanism that distinguishes my work. The work seems to remind us how, on the one hand, the wheels of history have stopped, they no longer turn, since the space to contain them has run out, and how each one of us, like a hamster in the wheel, invents a more or less circular trajectory each time, in the destiny of our own practice of existing, and how each of us, like a hamster in the wheel, invents a more or less circular trajectory in the destiny of our own practice of existing, which holds back our inertia and, on the other hand, how the plant continues to grow despite everything, to reproduce itself by multiplying its leaves, this time by detachment, in the globalised horizon of all metastatic systems, where everything reproduces itself without order and brake. The burnished root of the trunk, coagulated in the grimace of so many ancestral ancestors, like so many links of a broken chain, resists in its effort to bear the weight of meaning and stands as a warning and a guardian of our already completed disappearance.
Sergio Fermariello

In the hands of the artist, symbols and ideograms thicken and multiply until they seem like a swarming anthill of concepts and references, they grow until they become a memento mori for an entire people, they are engraved and printed in the hardest metal until they become as imposing as banners, and they always imply the ability to capture, convince, transport, and make the most of the experience of the artist. But convince of what? Convey where? It is not clear, because the author has made ambiguity – between background and foreground, between canvas and relief, between shading and shadow, between the historical sense of the image and possible new interpretations – one of his strong points, but it is clear that what counts for him, more than the message, more than understanding, is the vehicle of meaning. As if writing were not a means but an end, as if icons and signs were not to be interpreted but could live a life of their own. Almost as if, on the canvases, in the sculptures and in the installations, one should not find a story summed up and handed down by a series of symbols but rather graphics and drawings that, each time, stage a different story, all yet to be seen and told.
Maurizio Sciaccaluga

Sergio Fermaniello was born in Naples in 1961. In 1989 he exhibited for the first time at the Lucio Amelio Gallery in Naples, with which he began a long collaboration. In the same year he won the Saatchi & Saatchi International Prize for Young Artists at the Palazzo delle Stelline in Milan. In 1990 he exhibited at the Galleria Il Capricorno in Venice and in 1992 at the Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris. He participated in several international events such as the Metropolis exhibition at the International Kunstausstellung in Berlin and the Les pictographes exhibition at the Musèe de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix in Les Sables-d’Olonne in 1991. In 1993 he participated in the 45th edition of the Venice Biennale with a solo room in the Italian Pavilion. In 1995 he exhibited Opus Alchemico at the Galleria In Arco in Turin, in 1996 ContemporaneaComo 2 at Villa Olmo in Como and Homo necans at the Galleria Lucio Amelio in Naples. In 1997 the exhibition Sergio Fermariello. Lavori 1990-1997 was held at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Cologne and in 1999 he created the installationAvviso ai Naviganti at Castel dell’Ovo in Naples. In the same year he exhibited at the Jan Wagner Gallery in Berlin, in 2000 at the Galleria Ronchini in Terni and at the Galleria Scognamiglio & Teano in Naples. In 2004 a retrospective exhibition was dedicated to him at Castel Sant’Elmo in Naples and in 2005 he created an installation in the “pier17” dock in New York. In the same year he had a solo exhibition at the Galleria Scognamiglio in Naples and at the Galleria Ronchino Arte Contemporanea in Terni, in 2006 at the Galleria Buonanno in Milan and at the Galleria Erica Fiorentini in Rome; in 2007 at the Galleria Fioretto in Padua and in 2008 at the Galleria Ronchino in Terni. In 2009 he had two personal exhibitions at MAC in Niteroi, Brazil and at PAN in Naples.

Room 10

Take a picture of something and then take a picture of it again by taking a few steps back, so that you can find out if its context can give us more insight into that thing.
Armin Linke

In his global explorations, Armin Linke was drawn to the light architecture of the Glass Church in Baranzate. The parish church of Nostra Signora della Misericordia was designed by Angelo Mangiarotti and Bruno Morassutti in 1957, but the structural calculations by Bruno Favini were of great importance, as they made it possible to create a structure that is completely free in its perimeter. An industrial warehouse turned into a sacred building. At that time, the church had the effect of a satellite from a science fiction film ahead of its time. The church broke down the barriers to the world. The fatigue of time marks those structures made only of light and in need of restoration. Concrete life has now happily metabolised them. Linke captures this transition that has taken place. A sense of pacified expectation pervades the images, as if time, instead of consuming it, is giving more and more body to this space.
Giuseppe Frangi

Armin Linke was born in 1966 in Milan, lives and works in Berlin.

Room 9

Today the place of art, its image, is something you have to tear out with your teeth.
Gianni Dessì

There is never any improvisation, but always a time of depositing experience, a somewhat Zen-like search for the mental place most available for the formation and permanence of the image. […] A world, his, always in search of a point of equilibrium, of a focus, to be achieved starting from the chaos of the elements, from the dispersion of signs: which is a state of being where individual arguments find perfect agreement with those of a generation called, historically, to give shape to concepts and body to forms.
Federico De Melis

Room 8

The origin of a party. Everything is packaged, ready for consumption. The environment itself becomes a box that houses three main works: Self Control, Principessa sul pisello, Venere & cloni UomoTigre. The figures are static, mute and statuesque, goods in disguise, cloned and framed. The room becomes soft and sweet.
Elena Monzo

Elena Monzo is an observer who absorbs, filters and returns the issues of human life in a hard but at the same time light-hearted way; she creates abortions of harmonic opposites, which she piles up to bring them closer to real experience, made up of events so rapid and exploited that they can be ignored without creating any problems of conscience. The young artist seems to deliberately transport the virtual and television ethos onto the two-dimensional medium, superimposing images that can be enjoyed from afar without translation, or deciphered and understood beyond their decorativism, generating inexplicable swellings of all the hair bases that map our skin. […] If the fall were not part of the human experience, man would have been created with a more solid foundation. Elena Monzo’s art is both tragic and delightful, rendering with critical consciousness the only terrible everyday life we have been given to manage.

Viviana Siviero

Elena Monzo was born in Orzinuovi in the province of Brescia in 1981. She lives between Brescia and Milan. In 2004 she won the Italian Factory Award for young Italian painting and in 2007 she participated in the exhibitions Yourlineneismakingmesowetrightnow.lloveit and Why can’t we all just get along? at the Sara Tecchia Gallery in New York. In the same year he held his first solo exhibition Inside at Galleria Bonelli Contemporary in Los Angeles and Dipendenze at Galleria Traghetto in Rome. In 2008 she held the solo exhibition Nidi di Nodi di Bu at the Galleria Bonelli Arte Contemporanea in Mantua. In 2010 she took part in the (Con)Temporary Art event at Superstudiopiù in Via Tortona, Milan, presenting her latest works in a room entitled Specchio specchio delle mie brame.

Room 7

31 March 2010. The asymmetry of the walls, the original terracotta flooring and the large window looking out onto the inner garden give the room a temporal detachment and a light that remind me of the silences of childhood. This room, which Testori used as a library and which I now see disturbingly empty, seems to me to contain a secret, as if suspended and veiled. The room itself seems to me like a threshold, a curtain to be lifted. As I walk, I believe I am making a metaphorical invasion into the organism, the interiority and the anteriority of the house. May 2010. I thought of a large red velvet curtain fixed to the wall, slightly open to reveal the lack of a real passage. Around it on the wall, as if suspended in a dialogue between two and three dimensions, I draw anthropomorphic figures representing the tensions of a pulsional disorder. The figures are like sphinxes on either side of a theatrical illusory gap. At the centre of the composition in the works on paper and in the assemblage, the opening is an emptied coat of arms, deprived of the symbol of a social-political order or the mark of a Nobility. Nobility understood above all as Beauty and elevation. The actual or illusory lack of something central within the work is an experience of emptiness for the viewer. The work denies itself, the induced vision denies itself. That gap – white sheet or real breakthrough – is equivalent to a mirror, it is the heart of death, it transcends the work itself.
Umberto Chiodi

Childhood as a backdrop, the unconscious as a horizon, take on a highly dramatic temperature in Chiodi’s work because they are used by the artist to initiate a discourse on the visceral. Viscerality is a primary way of looking at the world, a system of pre-rational relations, unrelated and not necessarily motivated, in direct contact with the imaginary and strong enough to construct the discourse. Unnecessary, gratuitous, the relations of meaning that the imaginary creates have to do with the world of childhood once the latter has become an emblem of drive disorder against the rational order. Thus, the emblem of a clash, of a contradiction, of a tension. The imaginary is opposed, at least in aesthetic strategies, to the discourses of order, and Umberto Chiodi’s recent work takes on childhood, turning it from an implicit theme into an intention, a tension, which oversees the shaping of the work itself.
Giorgio Verzotti

Umberto Chiodi was born in Bentivoglio in 1981. He lives and works in Milan. He exhibited for the first time in 2003 at the Accademia d’Arte in Bologna. In 2006 he held a solo exhibition entitled Asfodelo at Studio d’Arte Cannaviello in Milan. In 2007 he took part in the group shows Arte Italiana, 1968-2007 at Palazzo Reale in Milan, Dopamine at Studio d’Arte Cannaviello and the exhibition Semplicitas, Duplicitas at Galleria Schultz Contemporary in Berlin. In 2008, the National Gallery of Fine Arts in Sofia dedicated the solo exhibition Umberto Chiodi to him. In 2009 the exhibition Superfetazione was held in Milan at Studio d’Arte Cannaviello.

Room 6

My artwork digests the idea of the city into a theme. The drawing is self-generated, taking a moment from memory and imagination and producing a system from experiences. In this way, I quantify the interactions of a series of structures into a pattern. The work does not have a goal. It starts with a simple balcony or structure and repeats itself, to rebuild and invent. I sit down with a pen in my hand and inscribe the most moving memories, and then create a context where they can proliferate. I ask the city how it wants to grow, how it wants to function, and how it wants to show itself. The drawing is self-generated. Like Italo Calvino’s fragments of Venice in Città Invisibili (Invisible Cities), these constructions take a point of interest and process it outwards and inwards. Outwards, like a detail, which becomes a starting point. Inwards, as these new themes prepare the ground for new human interactions in unusual environments. In this way I become my own memory. I see and imagine, and so I see again. The stage is made for a thematic development for the spectator. I make a high level of detail for an intense experience, but I cover and cut some parts of the formations. The idea of the cities goes beyond the medium, the viewers can interpret and imagine continuing the work through the depth of black.
Michael S. Lee

The ethical awareness of the value of “craft” work gives Michael S. Lee’s artistic research an attention to detail in which making and thinking are integrated with equal dignity. His drawings of cities are self-generated from a minimal element, triggered by memory, through a sort of automatic writing. The elaboration of the starting element takes place contextually towards the outside and the inside in an aesthetic and intellectual research that leads him to the creation of complex drawings and installations.
Loris Schermi

Michael S. Lee was born in 1988 in New York where he attended Cornell University to study architecture. He worked in South America in the summer of 2008 and now lives in Brooklyn, alternating between trips to Rome and Seoul. He specialises in drawing and installations. He exhibited at Palazzo Lazzaroni in Rome in 2009, at the Festa dell’Architettura in 2010 and in the same year at the Hartell Gallery Ithaca in New York.

Room 5

In Milan there used to be a lot of fog and you could play in the fog, as the song says (but then she would shout and then the game was no good and maybe it had to be played again, maybe not, it’s not clear). Now there is almost no fog in Milan, but I, who am not so young, remember it well and I also remember many people I met who occasionally emerged from the fog of this city, carrying within themselves the sense of it. But I am not the only one who remembers, and so I also want to give a form to those very real, though perhaps invented, people that Testori tells us about in Il ponte della Ghisolfa. This is not an illustration of the book, but an interpretation of the characters given by people who could be their modern version today. Thus juxtaposed with even truer portraits taken from the novel, they are all closed in jars, for better preservation, placed under grappa and immersed in fog.
Pippa Bacca

One of the problems man has always struggled with is that of the being and appearance of a thing, real or mental, and its relationship with the word that defines it: what is true and real? That which we see or something that the eye does not perceive? Heraclitus said that a river is never the same because the flowing water makes it an ever-changing entity, yet the “name” is always the same. The extreme idealists claimed that the reality of a thing is given by the thought that thinks it, only to injure themselves by hitting, in the darkness of a room, a leg on a chair that, unthought, did not exist! Gertrude Stein, Picasso’s great friend, used to say that “a rose is a rose, a rose, a rose”. But this is not true, and Pippa shows us, highlighting what complexity lies behind simple things and how many possibilities exist for establishing stable definitions whose reduction, Occam’s famous razor, risks complicating things even more. And so, an apparently nonchalant, ironic, “light” art leads us to “high” reflections that go beyond the pleasure of the eye and reminds us that man, if he is such, was made to “follow virtue and knowledge”.
Giorgio Bonomi

Pippa Bacca (1974- 2008)

Room 4

The work Mutter represents motherhood without a child and starts out as a tiny photo frame that develops into a 4 x 3 m billboard on the opposite side. In the veranda of Casa Testori, Mutter und Tochter is not so much a billboard as a wallpaper looking directly at us from the wall. The two images are hung in the veranda, which in its round, ambiguous architecture perfectly encapsulates the work in a cycle. One side leads to the area of everyday life; the other to the outside, to the garden. The two large photos are hung in the middle of the wall, facing each other. In the first, a girl is carrying her mother on her shoulder. The self-timer, still held in her hand, guides our gaze towards a photo on the ground depicting the newborn girl in her mother’s arms. In the second, the daughter turns around. The self-timer has been released from her hand and is under her foot in contact with the ground. Naked, the two figures look ahead, then into themselves. The two bodies merge into a collection of pieces of flesh. Their feet rest on the wooden floor of a real house, while the wallpaper induces a staging. And so the room repeats the installation itself, underlining the transition between past and present.
Julia Krahn

Since Julia Krahn’s work questions the permeability of the gaze between the identity of artist and spectator, it constantly deals with the question of memory. Everyday objects, symbols and traces of the past are thus redefined each time through the photographic image. But more than the narration of the passage of time or the construction of a story, Julia Krahn is interested in crystallising, transforming from a liquid to a solid state, the fragments of a private and secret reality. Julia’s works are characterised in this sense by an ambiguous fluidity: aesthetically attractive images, ultimately marked by an almost hermetic content […] Mutter is in fact a project in which the drama of the image is somehow intensified by the fear of forgetting and losing contact with the story chosen and constructed by the artist. The naked bodies, the embrace between mother and daughter, the reference to sacred symbolism manifest not only the attempt at survival, but also at re-signification, and therefore regeneration, that is entrusted to artistic practice.
Alessandro Castiglioni

Julia Krahn was born in Aachen, Germany in 1978 and moved to Milan in 2000, abandoning her medical studies to devote herself exclusively to photography. In 2001, she began working with Galleria Magrorocca in Milan and since then has exhibited in Italy and abroad, particularly in Spain, England and Germany. In 2001 she held her first solo exhibition entitled Intallation at the Schoking Space in Milan. In 2004 she participated in the project Whant you Yokeandzoom, London -Tokyo and held three solo shows in Milan, including eiapopaia_ninnananna at Galleria Openmind. In 2007 she held the exhibition The creation of Memory at Galleria Magrorocca and Denied Childhood at Museum Ludwigforum in Aachen. In 2008 she was runner-up at the Premio Arti Visive San Fedele in Milan and exhibited among the winners of the Premio de Fotografia de CCM, 5th in Barcelona. In the same year she was selected for the Tehran Biennial and was nominated as the best children’s photographer in Italy by Tau Visual. In 2009 she exhibited Engelstueck at Galleria Magrorocca in Milan, participated in MACO Mexico in Mexico City and PaxBank in Aachen. In 2010 she participated in Art Scope in Basel represented by Galleria Magrorocca and in 2012 she presented a solo exhibition at the Zircumflex studio in Berlin.

Room 3

But you can’t get to painting through conceptual means, it’s such a naïve position that it surprises me. You have to feel the weight, the substance of the material, which comes from such a distant place. It’s a habit you can’t shake, an absurd vice, like a mirror in the morning.
Enzo Cucchi

Here, it is no longer a question of painting, graphics or sculpture. The division of genres has sunk into the Mediterranean waters and rises from them as Aphrodite or as martyr. But in resurrecting, it has become an all-encompassing sign; sign – image; sign – emblem. Just as happened to the rock engravings of the Camuni, to the mystery symbols of the Egyptians, to the martyred graffiti of the catacombs. As also happened on the walls of the most scattered churches, where dedications of devotion or requests for mercy and grace were engraved. As happens, finally, on the trunks of the woods where, with flaming points of very short blades, the names, dates and hearts of the poorest and most desolate loves stopped forever.
Giovanni Testori

Enzo Cucchi was born in 1949 in Morro d’Alba, a farming village in the province of Ancona. He lives and works between Rome and Ancona, places from which he draws inspiration for his art. After starting out in the conceptual field, he turned to figurative art, becoming one of the main exponents of the historic nucleus of the Italian Transavanguardia, themed by Achille Bonito Oliva. In his works on canvas, accompanied by numerous drawings and often presented by poetic texts written by the artist himself, he reappropriates myth, art history and literature with a visionary gaze (Cani con lingua a spasso, 1980 and Eroe senza testa, 1981; Sia per mare che per terra, 1980), giving life to compositions of great symbolic intensity, in which the world is often represented as a battlefield between two opposing principles.
After the large compositions using charcoal and collage, he experimented with the use of different materials, including earth, burnt wood, neon tubes and iron (in the Vitebsk-Harar series dedicated to Arthur Rimbaud and Kazimir Severinovič Malevič) while embracing an almost Caravaggio-like use of light, which allowed him to achieve spatial depth effects.