“Permanenza della materia espansa” is an exhibition curated by Lorenzo Madaro that brings together works by Bertozzi & Casoni, Mario Ceroli, Lucio Del Pezzo, Piero Gilardi and Mimmo Rotella, five decisive protagonists of Italian art between the second half of the 20th century and the contemporary period, who share an intense and anything but neutral relationship with matter, with the object and with the work’s ability to retain, within its own form, a density of time, memory and imagination. The exhibition was born within a broader path of research and rediscovery that Sangallo Fine Art is leading, in dialogue with Lorenzo Madaro, around some masters of contemporary art history, reread not in a celebratory key but as presences still capable of questioning our gaze and our present. In this perspective, Permanence of Expanded Matter relates five autonomous trajectories, profoundly different in terms of languages and formal solutions, but united by a common centrality attributed to matter as the critical site of the work.
In Bertozzi & Casoni ‘s sculptures, the everyday is offered as residue, waste, a trace of consumption. Disposable dishes, food remains, domestic fragments are returned by ceramics with extreme precision, transforming the ephemeral into permanence and waste into a kind of relic of the present. Their research produces a subtle short-circuit between technical splendor and material dissipation, between the seduction of form and the fragility of things. Instead, with Mario Ceroli, matter becomes structure, scansion, construction of space. Wood, an essential element of his research, becomes a threshold between sculpture and environment, between figure and architecture. His silhouettes, reduced to a primary essentiality, do not describe reality but construct an archetypal synthesis of it, transforming presence into visual rhythm and spatial measure. Lucio Del Pezzo ‘s work introduces a different quality of relationship with the object: more mental, more calibrated, more enigmatic. Symbols, geometric forms, iconic memories and fragments of the everyday are organized in rigorous compositions, where constructive precision opens to an ironic and suspended vibration. The work thus becomes a relational device, a visual alphabet in which the object loses its function and acquires a new symbolic intensity.
With the famous “Carpet-nature,” Piero Gilardi instead tackles the knot, a decisive one, of the relationship between landscape and artifice. His fragments of nature, made of expanded polyurethane, appear both credible and perturbing: the natural is rendered through the synthetic, the perception of the living is filtered by technology, and the work lucidly reveals the now-mediated nature of our gaze on the world. Finally, in Mimmo Rotella, matter coincides with the very surface of visual modernity. Through décollage, advertising posters torn from urban walls become palimpsests of torn images, slogans, faces and typographic fragments, restoring to the city its own most unstable truth: that of an archive continually exposed to time, consumption, and erasure. Accompanying the exhibition is a catalog published by Metilene, with an essay by Lorenzo Madaro and biographical profiles by Maria Elena Morselli, designed as a further tool for critical insight around the artists and works on display.
“Permanence of Expanded Matter” thus proposes a reflection on how matter, in contemporary art, can still make itself an archive, a historical surface, a repository of memory and a symbolic construction: not simply the body of the work, but a place where the real settles, resists, continues to speak.
To request the complete worklist of available works and to purchase the exhibition catalog, you can write to info@sangallofineart.it or via form in the Contact section of the website.
