Room 2

The research stems from the need to respond to the destabilisation to which our technological and virtual society exposes us every day. The virtual world, in fact, changes our perception of space and time, making the need to map, circumscribe and ascribe one’s physical, carnal presence in a precise time and space increasingly pressing.
This geography – that of one’s own person, one’s own life – is constructed in an affective relationship with things, places and people. For this reason, the privileged instrument of research is memory. It anchors the human subject in the here and now and makes a constructive (and therefore creative) link with the world possible. In my work, this investigation is carried out by analysing places, objects and people through which it becomes possible to reconstruct one’s presence in the world.
Elisabetta Tagliabue

There are things we need to remember.
Important things that we don’t want to lose – almost can’t – because they have said or say a part of us.
The geographies, small maps, invite us to follow the artist in a real exploration of memory made accessible by the stratification of photography and drawing, plans and brief notes. The pause on a particular object, the inclusion or exclusion of details, the sudden changes of scale and plan are the steps of a path that articulates signs and structures in spaces capable of communicating the life of those who inhabited them.
If geographies retrace, places retain.
The modelling of a recurring idea characterises places, as if it were a sequence of variations on a theme. One definition follows another, as in a search that tirelessly retraces its steps to sound out its reasoning once again. Suddenly, however, in the dialogue between memory and creation, one memory inexplicably opens up another and the chosen path leads in a new direction: W. becomes a fish, the fish an apple.
Federico Giani

Elisabetta Tagliabue was born in Milan in 1985, where she lives and works.

Room 1

Reality wants to be the object of my research. The relationship with it is manifested through continuous contemplation: a prolonged, silent and meditative observation of something from within.
I work with simple gestures of selection of the real that together recreate a parallel reality. I am interested in the human story, the individual and the multitude.
I am constantly looking for individuality in the crowd, this is the pretext for continuous close observation of the like.
I attend rallies, concerts, funerals and events with a video camera in my hand. I take part in events by camouflaging myself in the crowd, which allows me to investigate the gestures, the bodies, the manifestations of small tensions of the individual. The crowd is the pretext, the event is the container of the human being to be observed, followed, recorded; the body is the envelope of an interiority that manifests itself.
Tensions and emotions take on multiple forms and aspects in the dialectic between subjectivity and multitude, self-affirmation and belonging to a group.
Emma Ciceri

Emma Ciceri’s work can be a response to the rhetoric of anonymity in the big city.
On the occasion of a student demonstration, Ciceri captured the square and its movements, its unstoppable energy.
With her ability to capture movement and stasis, with the light that affects and accentuates, with the saturated colours and the time dilation that she injects into the footage, the street proves to be a vital stall for individuals.
But in her images, of the young people who for a moment emerge from the crowd, we notice above all the always unique intensity of expression, the attitudes concentrated even in the chaos, the appearance and gestures that preside over meetings and relationships, so intimately linked to emotional states.
Social behaviour is revealed in its complexity: partly an unconscious expression, shaped by collective action, by the fact of taking part in a great mass ritual; partly the fruit of care and conscious attention: playing one’s part and offering oneself to the gaze of others that responds to codes and conventions, but can take bizarre forms.
The effect is cinematic, but without anything anecdotal or sentimental.The micro-reality that emerges from the video is part of the great, complex spectacle of everyday life and expresses our polyphonic society of individuals.
Gabi Scardi

Emma Ciceri was born in Ponte San Pietro (BG) in 1983.

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.