Galleria Raffaella Cortese is pleased to announce Sbandata [Crush], curated by Pierre Bal-Blanc, the fourth solo show by Marcello Maloberti since 2002, year of the first collaboration.

Malobertiʼs artistic research draws inspiration from day-to-day events and urban contexts. His observations go beyond the ordinary evidence of everyday experience with a neorealistic approach going towards a visionary direction. The artist puts together an extremely condensed, theatrical narrative and suspenseful atmospheres to watch and feel. Marcello Maloberti also emphasizes the relationship between art and life researching new approaches to merge photography, video, performance, installation, sculpture and drawing, as to form a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk. In the last years the artist has often evoked in his works the History of Art and classicism, through a performative language and the use of the body, with an interactive impact for the public.

The exhibition, the result of the artistic dialogue between the curator Pierre Bal-Blanc and Marcello Maloberti, is divided in all the three spaces of via Stradella, reconnecting them through visual and conceptual references. The curatorial project is based on a reverse process: the curator will write the curatorial text at the end of the exhibition, rather than before it, as usual practice. This reflects the artist�s approach to logical and time connections, which he turns upside � down, distant from any obvious perspective. The title of the exhibition, Sbandata, alludes to an amorous crush in the classical culture, an incursion in its forms, but also an escape, a Summer wind. The works on display belong to different languages and supports, but come together in a single score of signs and meanings.

The collages of the artist, Marmellate [Jams], on show in via Stradella 7, are to be understood as visual notes, private signs, raptures, loves at first sight, all constant research and sources of the artist�s work, becoming a sort of archive of ideas that anticipates the themes of the other spaces. The works expand beyond the usual exhibition spaces, making the gallery uniquely accessible on this occasion, almost as if it were the hold of a ship that conceals a treasure. In the background there is an audio, Cicerone, in which the voice of Roberto Carozzi, a guide of the Suardi oratory, describes the fresco by Lorenzo Lotto thus evoking an absent image.

The floor of the space in via Stradella 4 is permeated with scraps of classical domes and blue-tinted ceilings, and sixteenth-century frescos by Veronese. The installation, titled Trionfo dell�Aurora [Triumph of the Aurora], with reference to one of the Tiepolo�s frescoes at Villa Baglioni in Massanzago (Padova), creates an impossible trompe-l�oeil. Walking on the floor gives a sense of vertigo caused by an abundance of images, referring to the digital culture and to the overexposure of visual stimuli, typical of contemporary society.

In the space of via Stradella 1 is presented for the first time a reproduction of a performance by Marcello Maloberti with a different technique, an oil painting on birch wood. The image is taken from the Pune Biennale, in 2017.

Marcello Maloberti, with Sbandata, guides us through the discovery of references and connections between the works and the installations that invade the gallery, envisioning the exhibition as if it were an archeological intervention. The artist skillfully creates an atmosphere of mystery, of disorientation and, at the same time, of preciousness and elegant sacredness of classical derivation.