Pulvis et Umbra Sumus

Galleria Allegra Ravizza is pleased to present the exhibition Pulvis et Umbra Sumus, a group exhibition of young artists who have distinguished themselves for their art and creativity in the San Fedele Visual Arts Prize in Milan: Alessio Barchitta (1991), Debora Fella (1990), Paolo Migliazza (1988), Miriam Montani Magrelli (1986), and Luca Pianella (1985).

Hosted in the Milan space, at Via Gorani 8, the group exhibition will open on Thursday June 26 from 6 PM to 9 PM, in the presence of the artists, and will remain open to the public until October 3, 2025.

The title of the exhibition Pulvis et Umbra Sumus references a verse from the Odes by the famous Roman poet Horace, which can be translated as "we are dust and shadow," emphasizing the elusive and intangible nature of human existence, eternally subjected to the fleeting nature of time. According to the poet, the looming presence of death and the inescapable mortal nature of humanity should serve as a reminder to enjoy and savor every joyful moment of the present. Carpe diem!

The exhibition features thirty works that explore this theme both materially and conceptually: through diverse and multifaceted uses of dust, ash, plaster, or graphite, ach work delves into and reveals the decline and dissolution of being alongside the blurring of memory, the evanescence of light, and the inevitable—and sometimes catastrophic—passage of time.

As evidence of this, Alessio Barchitta presents a work from the Coordinate project (2017): layers of silicone capturing fragments of plaster and paint collected from the walls of abandoned homes built in Sicily, his native land, between the 19th and 20th centuries. These ruined buildings, aged and already lived in, now only reveal their history—marked by the comings and goings of inhabitants and guests who, according to their tastes, turned those walls into a home: from Art Nouveau decorations to the increasingly flat and-perhaps- indifferent plaster of the last tenants. Each piece tells a different story, revealing a growing neglect of domestic spaces and a shift towards an era of fast mobility, temporary housing, anonymous spaces, and unstable situations. This layering of silicone, paint, and plaster, spread like a cloth drying in the sun, includes geographic coordinates that aim to recall places of origin and the awareness of a past that no longer exists.

The domestic sphere is also evoked in the works of Miriam Montani Magrelli, who during the lockdown created the piece Habitat, Dentro come Fuori—a reproduction of details from the interior walls of her home in Milan, made using the fine dust of the city. From December 2019, she began collecting this "skin" of her space by scraping and vacuuming the surfaces with a small handheld vacuum cleaner, not without difficulty. The bathroom and kitchen tiles, decorative plates and Venetian plasters from her room become the main protagonists, creating a dialogue between interior and exterior that captures the alienation of everyday life and domestic spaces. Precisely at a time when human power attempts to exert control over life, fine dust—waste product of capitalism—represents the unpredictable. Her artistic practice, multifaceted and polymorphous, consistently refers not to the visible image but to the one that unfolds in a dreamlike or imagined vision, or that emerges from traces and signs of occurrence—manifesting through the use of fragile and ephemeral materials like dust or organic elements. From this research comes the 2020 series Inversioni di Volo, in which the artist, after compiling an inventory of Milan's dust, symbolically inverts the weight of the city: everything that gravitates toward the ground acquires an aerial and volatile nature. Heavy objects—such as stones, asphalt droplets, or items—dematerialize, leaving only outlines that are transferred to paper using the very substance that, by nature, floats in the air, moved by the slightest breeze: dust. In this way, the artist transmutes a solid body into an immaterial, weightless one, inverting its trajectory in an upside-down vision of the world.... read the rest of the article»