DO / DON'T PAINT

Do / Don’t paint
Francesco Fossati, Daniela Gomez Paz, Giulio Paolini, Liliane Tomasko, Denise Werth

Curated by Lorenzo Madaro

APRIL 22 – JUNE 11, 2023 
Opening April 21, 6 – 8PM 

The exhibition is a possible itinerary through the paths of colour, painting and its borders, its assumptions and its complexities, even paradoxical ones, in a dialectic confrontation between names of different generations who have studied, accepted and interpreted it through heterogeneous approaches, following absolutely autonomous lines of investigation that pass from a sophisticated conceptual methodology to a magmatic and vital gesture, from a rethinking of traditional techniques - under the banner of a discourse linked to sustainability - to an expansion of two-dimensionality in the territories of sculpture and the installation.

Do / Don't will therefore be a choral journey – with international presences of primary importance, from the artist Liliane Tomasko to the master Giulio Paolini – in which the viewer will be able to immerse himself in different instances, also accentuated by the attitudes of the individual artists, by their belonging to different generations and geographies, but also by the languages ​​adopted.

Organic pictures by Francesco Fossati are canvases made with ecological printing techniques, transferring the pigments of certain botanical materials – for example roots, vegetables, leaves, fruit – onto fabrics of vegetable fibers such as cotton and linen. They are zero-kilometre works, the raw materials are sourced from his garden and in the immediate vicinity of his studio and even transport for exhibitions or installations in collectors' homes took place through non-impactful solutions. It is the ecology of self-sufficiency, which reaffirms not only the autonomy of artistic research with respect to the external rhythms of consumerism and contamination, but a profound relationship with plants, with their life.

The works of Daniela G. Paz are ideal finds of a personal archeology of suggestions, images, signs, traces of an intimate and inscrutable memory, real stratifications in which to trace spaces of other cultures, ranging between visual and cultural geographies. The artist thus proposes paths of materials, in which he includes synthetic fibers, pastels, organic materials, sometimes resins and other materials such as glitter that are stratified on surfaces conceived through prints made with monotypes or other techniques. The work sometimes comes out of its two-dimensionality to develop in space in an installation declination, confronting itself with the architectural space and initiating a direct and intimate relationship with the public. On the other hand, they appear as intimate diaries, where you write down thoughts that are impossible to decipher.

Giulio Paolini – whose role is fundamental for understanding the events of Italian and international art since the early 1960s – has based his whole discourse of the last half century and beyond on a systematic reflection on the figure of the artist and on the conceptual value of the work. On the other hand, Paolini has been reflecting on the expanded concept of the museum for a long time, always managing however to be coherent and to amaze. Isn't this the grace that art reserves for the great masters? His collages, linked to his recent production, reaffirm the conceptual principle of citation at the basis of his path, but also his special aptitude for considering the history of painting and art in general as a large archive from which to draw for new spaces of 'investigation.

Liliane Tomasko's painting is impetuous, magmatic, multiform and dense, it releases a swirling energy in its process that reflects on the potential of the pictorial medium by linking itself to the historical experiences of abstract expressionism and acting as a space for meditation on oneiric territories and reflections on emotional aspects of existence. It is a body to body with painting, the one practiced by the artist, in a dense dialogue with the surfaces that shed their skin on contact with a real magma of signs and colors that intertwine in a single vital jet, conceiving surfaces that attract for their sophisticated industriousness, revealing one of the artist's principles, namely a meditated work around painting and its boundaries.

It is in the dimension of color that one of the cardinal points of Denise Werth's work becomes explicit, in her ability to articulate three-dimensional objects with a monochrome approach that seem to emerge from a laborious future. In fact, his sculptures appear as artifacts, in which the forms resemble objects of common use or in any case linked to a collective imagination. Expanding in space, they reveal the catalytic force of form, imposing themselves as totemic forms, in a dialogue between languages, genres and in a total interpenetration of chronologies, because his object sculptures seem to come from an inaccessible time.