Andreas Zampella. Il cielo sopra Milano

Galleria Poggiali presents Il cielo sopra Milano, a show by Andreas Zampella curated by Nicolas Ballario. It consists of an installation that creates within the gallery an eerie and unsettling starry sky that the city of Milan can admire every night from outside the premises. The show will open on Wednesday 11 February in the Milan branch of the Gallery in Foro Buonaparte 52.

In a Milan where the stars can no longer be seen, where the sky has been annihilated by the street lights, by the advertising, by the continual self-reflection of consumption, the night still exists but it’s no longer dark. So, as Nicolas Ballario puts it, Andreas Zampella ‘performs a gesture that has something of the archaic while at the same time being profoundly contemporary: he brings the stars back into sight by introducing them into a room. An unnatural constellation takes shape from the ceiling of the Galleria Poggiali. Ordinary objects, fragments of the everyday and relics of a hyperfunctional civilisation are glued and suspended, released from the gravity of their fate. Where they ought to have fallen and been left to rot, they now shine. The darkness ignites them. The fluorescence transforms them into signals, presences, makeshift celestial bodies. They are objects destined to be thrown away, and perhaps for this reason too they become a still life that belies its own name: because here nothing is truly still, nothing is placated. These forms appear to be alive, unstable, ready to change state. The light they emanate is not consoling, but unsettling.’

In his work Zampella develops the idea that daily life is a continuous performance and that the still life is now a pure form of spectacle and a highly evocative image. The still life, as Giorgio de Chirico understood it, is indeed ‘the silent life of objects’. In his reworking the artist sees life as a source of light, and the constellation proposed in the Galleria Poggiali alludes to the ambivalence between the vitality of the light and the death of the forgotten object. As a result, his work arouses a feeling that veers between weariness and tension, irony and melancholy, leading the observer towards a reflection on mortality and the meaning of time in human life.

The installation in fact impels us to look upwards, an everyday gesture and often performed in solitude, albeit now almost forgotten. In the show, we are obliged to look up. These found and reassembled objects become artificial galaxies. Worlds at once distant and very close. A universe built out of what remains. A cosmos without heroism, without conquest, without promise. Only drift. Only cold light in the darkness. In this universe man is not in the centre, but beneath. Tiny. Observer of what he has created and already forgotten.

Biographical notes

Andreas Zampella (Salerno, 1989) lives and works in Milan, where he has developed an artistic praxis that combines painting, sculpture, installation and site-specific spaces. His work focuses on the transformation of performance, creating places where reality and imagination entwine and where the observer has to play the roles of both spectator and actor. Zampella uses simple materials and everyday fragments to construct suspended compositions that yield silent narrations and hypnotic visions. His work explores tensions between presence and absence, static and performative, inviting the public to enter his installations and participate in them. In recent shows, such as Passaggio al buio at the Quadriennale in Rome, Zampella staged ‘precarious balances’ and material short-circuits that generate alienating and poetic visions. We should also mention his participation in the Premio Lissone curated by Francesca Guerisoli and the solo show Quarta dimensione, curated by Lucrezia Longobardi and held in the church of Santa Trinità in Polla.