Renata Fabbri Gallery is glad to open the new year’s program with an exhibition dedicated to the formal and conceptual confines of what we might call “painting” today. In the context of the show this definition is being explored through a selection of new and existing works re-contextualized specifically for this show, a project gathering a group of Italian artists under 45.

«Silenzioso, mi ritiro a dipingere un quadro» is the title of an early painting by Mimmo Paladino who, in 1977, highlights a renewed (and general) attention towards the intimate and conceptual dimension of painting as a practice, after decades of experimentation with other languages and materials that violently entered the territories of visual arts. Today, after forty years since the birth of that painting, where does this practice stand in relation to its intimate/private dimension among contemporary artistic experiences in Italy? Is painting still an intimate “body to body” between the artist and one or more specific media and interlocutors? And what are the routes of research characterizing this practice? And the borders of the painting, which tangencies and declinations have they expressed?

The exhibition is not conceived as the investigation of contemporary painting in itself. Such complex and layered landscape can’t be summarized through a simple group show. Instead, the project intends to focus on individuality, gathering a group of practitioners addressing specific questions. Issues that do not necessarily share a formal and intellectual approach but that look into diverse research strands related to ideas of ecology, identity, the digital image, archetypes and simulacra, political discourse, but also form a matter, and so to the medium, moving through and beyond the concept of painting.

Therefore this project does not articulate as an exploration, instead as a test that transforms the statement «Silenzioso, mi ritiro a dipingere un quadro» (Quiet, I withdraw to paint) in a loosely formulated question, observing some ways in which this process – both private and public – might belong to painting and its disintegration today. The show wants to investigate the dimension of “making”, through this medium as well as through installations and sculptures.