Un mondo tutto all’aperto. Alice Cattaneo, Marco Andrea Magni

From January 15th to March 14th, 2026, BUILDING GALLERY presents the exhibition Un mondo tutto all’aperto by artists Alice Cattaneo and Marco Andrea Magni, curated by Giovanni Giacomo Paolin. The exhibition unfolds as a journey connecting the ground floor and first floor of the gallery, offering a bilateral dialogue between sculptures and installations, in which existing works and new productions intertwine, with very different forms but similar sensibilities.

The title of the exhibition is a quote from a short story by Italo Calvino entitled Dall’opaco, contained in La strada di San Giovanni (1990), an autobiographical collection published posthumously by the writer's wife. In this “exercise in memory,” Calvino describes the places of his childhood as a world made up of broken and oblique lines, in which the horizon remains the only possible continuous straight line. Through multiple references to the landscape, the writer explores the ways in which the gaze and the position of the body function in a given place, remaining pleasantly caught between the ambiguities of perception. He addresses universal themes with apparent simplicity, creating images that can naturally be placed alongside contemporary artistic research, especially if it is sculptural in nature.

The words that make up the title suggest a contradiction: how can a world that is entirely outdoors exist? Can the concept of openness also contain its opposite? Calvino writes about his surroundings, referring to opposing but coexisting characteristics: a world made up of clarity and opacity, of sunshine and shade, of one side that is bright and another that is gloomy. He himself writes from the opaque and from there, he tries to describe personal worlds in which “each of us stays in our own but looks at others in theirs, and no one ever leaves their own but is always under the eyes of others.” The open and the closed thus become ways of being, in which everything that appears to the eye is exposed and withdrawn at the same time.

Un mondo tutto all’aperto has been constructed based on forms of coexistence between two artistic research projects and the space that hosts them, working in contact with a certain degree of opacity linked to mutual knowledge. This has also translated into specific exhibition design choices, whereby the BUILDING exhibition space features a number of fabric modules that can be interpreted as devices capable of altering the relationship with the exhibition environments. From a simple gesture, echoed in some of the works, a shared way of reinterpreting the gallery's architecture was born: a structure that neither closes nor separates completely, but opens up new possibilities for orientation.

The exhibition opens on the ground floor with the interaction of pairs of works, referring to an “open space” rich in cracks, perspectives, and slopes. The first are two versions of Ruffiani (2025) by Marco Andrea Magni, in which wooden slats seem to escape the definition of a frame; alongside them are two Untitled (2019) works by Alice Cattaneo, in which four different Murano glass elements are joined by a cement grip and inserted into a small iron form that supports them vertically.

From their opacity, these pairs of works lead the viewer towards a first encounter with openness: Untitled mark vertical lines of demarcation in space, as if the material were able to open a glimmer of light between two different dimensions; Ruffiani, on the other hand, amplify the transformations of a given perimeter, favoring a new type of vision beyond the boundaries of the image itself.... read the rest of the article»