"In the wake of the general collapse of the space of myth, the knowledge of myth becomes the basis for creativity and the perception of reality." (E. A.) With the project "Twelve, wood, dolphin, knife, bowl, mask, crystal, bones and marble - fusion. Exploring materials" inaugurated at the Maramotti Collection in 2013 of which this work is part, Evgeny Antufiev wants to lead the viewer in a perceptive experience of transformation in which materials, objects, shapes - which we usually associate with physical functions - abandon their daily identity to re-enter an archetypal dimension. According to the artist, the ancient, mysterious sacredness of the image has lost its aura; the image is no longer able to connect us to an 'other' dimension, in which we can continue on the path of building our identity, of our relationship with the world. The "display" of Antufiev's world speaks to us of the nostalgia for an eschatological tension in which everything could reconnect between the human and divine planes and in which the creative gesture of man could catalyze an energy in constant mutation, capable of to evoke an immortality, understood not as survival, but as a "persistence of meaning".

The painting is part of a larger project entitled "Parallel Universe", consisting of five new works which, as often happens in the work of this artist, were painted at the same time, in the same studio, so that during their realization they entered in dialogue with each other, becoming the result of the same creative process. De Balincourt has a highly intuitive approach to painting, which favors an organic development of the works, which thus specifically take shape both individually and as a whole. The paintings of "Parallel Universe" can therefore be read as a map of freely intertwined parts, aimed at exploring and recording the relationships that exist between representation, abstraction and pictorial gesture. His are images that border on abstraction, they are more symbolic than diagrammatic and can therefore be seen as a liberating need, not only in the sense of a progressive shift from figuration to abstraction, but also in terms of liberation from modes of thought. rational and objective. "Psychedelic Soldier" can be a kind of self-portrait for an artist who rarely represents himself openly in his works. The painting becomes the paradigm of an exploration of pictorial techniques of "camouflage", a concealment under the eyes of all, an immersion in the surrounding environment. Camouflage, in giving the artist's work a complex transparency, can thus be considered a metaphor of the pictorial gesture in general and of the layering of images in this exhibition. The face of the soldier and the surface of the globe, for example, may imply different ways of representing a landscape or a conflicting space. For de Balincourt the camouflage uniform that i Soldiers wearing in war zones makes them even more visible rather than blending them with the surrounding space and, absurdly, transforms them into potential targets.The painting thus becomes a protest against the absurdity of war.

The work is part of a project inaugurated in 2014 at the Maramotti Collection entitled "Portrait of women" which put the artists Alessandra Ariatti and Chantal Joffe in dialogue: both have concentrated their artistic research in portraits, a figural tradition that has been continuously traversed Western art (but not only) from the fifteenth century to today. The portrait, as an investigation of the interiority, as well as of the features, of a person or character, dates back, even before the modern era, to Greek and Roman marble portraits; while adapting to the evolution of styles and forms, it has always maintained the historical need to bear witness to instances of social cohesion or dissociation. The portraits of these artists are anchored on the one hand to the aesthetics, or rather to culture, of contemporary art and on the other, perhaps even more intimately than for the artists of the past, to the 'milieu' in which they live and work. Their formal connection, however, ends here. In fact, Joffe insistently, almost obsessively, represents a single, full-field figure - whole or almost, immersed in a defined environmental space - with extremely loose brushstrokes, which blend the details of the face, clothes and environment in a single pictorial flow. In this nucleus of works, in which the artist admittedly recalls Edvard Munch's paintings on puberty and which he titled "Moll" (hence the title of his exhibition), the subject is the now sixteen year old niece - who portrays from birth - now reached an age in which the inner dimension is full of dreams and at the same time of inscrutable mystery. This existential condition can be extended to the way in which the artist presents female identity in general in his other works, with an “ambiguity” that generates complexity. Moll's eyes, in these four portraits made in just five months, do not let themselves be captured, his gaze points beyond: stylistically Joffe recalls the all-over, the soft contours, the decorative value of the fabrics in Matisse in an emotionally painting dense.

The work is part of a project inaugurated in 2014 at the Maramotti Collection entitled "Portrait of women" which put the artists Alessandra Ariatti and Chantal Joffe in dialogue: both have concentrated their artistic research in portraits, a figural tradition that has been continuously traversed Western art (but not only) from the fifteenth century to today. The portrait, as an investigation of the interiority, as well as of the features, of a person or character, dates back, even before the modern era, to Greek and Roman marble portraits; while adapting to the evolution of styles and forms, it has always maintained the historical need to bear witness to instances of social cohesion or dissociation. The portraits of these artists are anchored on the one hand to the aesthetics, or rather to culture, of contemporary art and on the other, perhaps even more intimately than for the artists of the past, to the 'milieu' in which they live and work. Their formal connection, however, ends here. Ariatti paints groups of figures that have a hyper-photographic precision, functional to the possibility of probing their psychological depth and the intensity of human interrelation. The artist focuses essentially on the faces and the accentuation of their formation in a mini-social nucleus, underlined by the general title he gave to his group of works: "Bonds". What interests her, in the practice of her painting, is the possibility of highlighting a relationship between the subjects of the works and the artist and of generating a dialogue with the viewer. Stylistically Ariatti aspires to the hard-edged intensity of Renaissance saints and has invested four full years of his work in portraying the three families featured in this project.

The project consists of ten works, some installed on the wall, others placed on the ground. The canvases are presented as reflective panels that welcome phantasmic presences of the underlying painting and at the same time absorb and restore the external space to the work. The canvases on the ground, sculptural elements, are conceived as rejects: scraps that rise to the value of possibility / potential. Kassay's work is anchored to a minimalist praxis in which the industrial process in the production of the work subtracts the quality value of the artefact to replace it with that of objectivity, making it in a certain sense interchangeable. The conceptual elements of monochromatism, of the objectification of the pictorial pigment, of the reflection of color, movement and form, assume centrality in his research and are codified and translated into a new metaphysics of the pictorial surface, in a new form of abstraction, strongly lyrical, where the reference to photography is evident. The realization of his works starts from the preparation of the canvas with the drafting of large fields of acrylic that make the surface waterproof, to then move on to the subsequent silver plating, chemically obtained with an industrial process similar to the electroplating bath that crystallizes the accidents of the painting on the canvas, causing unevenness of the silver surface. The plating process also determines a combustion / burning of the edges and exposed parts of the canvas along the perimeter, and the appearance of unevenly burnished and oxidized areas on the metal surface that Kassay cannot preventively control. Kassay, trained in photography, has transposed many of these techniques into painting practice. The chemical process of silvering the canvases is similar to the ancient process of photography on gelatin with silver salts: both techniques produce a transmutation in which light becomes the central element for raising awareness of the support and perception of the work.

The work is part of a complex sculptural installation created by Krištof Kintera, with the collaboration of Richard Wiesner and Rastislav Juhás, for Collezione Maramotti, entitled "Postnaturalia". The title is largely explanatory: the scenario in which our daily experience is inscribed as individuals and as a community is no longer that of the natural world. In the so-called "copper age", based on the transmission of energy and information, nature is compared by Kintera to an enormous nervous system; also for this reason his project is grafted into different spaces of the Collection as in a living organism. Images, photographs, notes and drawings on the walls, waste materials, electrical and electronic, stills, lamps, chemicals are all tools and objects of the trade that become generative elements for the artist of a new natural beauty. Taking as a model the ancient attitude of the scientist and his prototypes (models and herbariums kept in cases in the laboratory), new types of plants are grown, classified and sown in a large para-vegetal nervous system that finds space in a second room of the Collection. The "Systemus Postnaturalis" presents a synthetic carpet of plants that grows between an intricate copper root network: three islands that are connected to each other by paths that the visitor can experience. Light, which favors its growth, is also artificially piloted in space. Kintera insinuates himself into the theme of "post-natural" with vivid visual suggestions that he leads with an ironic, playful but also bitter spirit, in the framework of a complex social and political questioning about our time, moved by the hope of soliciting awareness on a question of great actuality. The relationship with "Natural Nature", the attempt to know, even by imagining, and to give order to the different forms of biological life - anchoring to our cultural tradition - are for Kintera a starting point that is provocatively subverted by constructing totally artificial scenarios , working and generating new synthetic materials and waste products that make up our daily para-natural habitat. A melancholy provocation that induces the desire to create alternative scenarios in which science and technology - protagonists in the construction of our physical landscape and our system of relationships - can proceed in the constant search for a "new humanism" in which man - and not the sum of its functions - remain solidly at the center and advance without forgetting its identity, the collective cultural memory in which its existence and the permanence of real relationships are inscribed. Can the artist then perhaps suggest a new poetic texture to technology in which we do not "forget" who we are?

The three large canvases exhibited in this project evocatively recall and mirror each other and assume the complex subject of the Crucifixion as a matrix, as a “pilot flame”. Pessoli's painting is eclectic, rich in historical memories and sedimentations (from metaphysics, to surrealism, to popular visual culture) with which he maintains an empathic adhesion, perfectly managing to internalize the sense of continuity in the history of art. In this exhibition, the images belonging to a religious iconographic tradition are actualized and become the bearers of potential figural reinventions. Maintaining this basic register, Pessoli reinvents, recalibrates the shapes and the emotional intensity of these figures by putting them in close dialogue with the landscape that welcomes them, giving them a different lightness, creating a balance between drama and pictorial playfulness. Processually his work is built with a fluid heterogeneity of techniques and styles: the craftsmanship of collage and spray paint applied through the use of masks, interpenetrates with the more traditional pictorial gesture, becoming an integral part of it. Pessoli's painting is therefore formed through a process of linguistic, symbolic, physical construction and deconstruction, in which often the erased, covered, surviving parts constitute the supporting structure of the painting, in search of an inner truth, which manifests itself in the vitality of the painting. image and brushstroke, the goal the artist continually strives for in his work. Painting has always been a language of choice for Pessoli, from its inception, in the late 1980s, to today.

"Casa Malaparte", the project created by Enoc Perez for the Maramotti Collection, consists of these two large oil paintings: "Casa Malaparte (Day)" and "Casa Malaparte (Night)". The subject is a true icon of Italian modernist architecture. Designed and built in Capri in the late thirties by Curzio Malaparte himself, it was intensely "cut to its own size" by the writer who called it "home like me". The project is in continuity with the research, started by the Puerto Rican artist in the second half of the nineties, on the architecture of the 1920s / 1950s and on how these have been transfigured, by the collective imagination, into social forms / metaphors of power, fascination, beauty in an era full of optimism towards the future. But his paintings evoke, at the same time, the disillusionment with a vanished dream and the “purely phantasmic and mental consistency of the images”. Here, too, the figures that Perez extracts from the photographic or filmic society to “act as painting” refer to a questioning on the modern role of painting itself and on its capacity for renewal. Enoc Perez's painting is the result of a complex process. The transfer of color on the canvas takes place without the use of brushes, starting from a series of sketches drawn in pencil on the paper: individual sketches for each color that the artist will use for the painting. Subsequently the artist applies a layer of color on the back of the sheet, color which is then transferred to the back of the canvas by tracing the design. The process is comparable to the monoprint, a particular mechanical printing, enriched by a complex manual skill in the process of creating the work. Rich images gradually develop from the many layers, creating rough and abraded effects on the surface which, while preserving a rich color texture, take on a strongly evocative character, emphasizing a sort of "nostalgia" of the material.

With "Untitled" Gert & Uwe Tobias present an installation consisting of twenty-one works including large woodcuts, drawings and sculptures, within a walldrawing that covers all the walls of the exhibition space. As with all their previous installations, the Tobias have created a poster, a large color woodcut that exemplifies their original way of making writing and image dialogue. The poster thus becomes both a work of art, contextual to the other works on display, and an advertising tool. In their works, iconic elements of easy readability, taken from the popular culture of the homeland, Transylvania, and from images of European folklore, where myths and archaic traditions are deposited with strong ingenuity and extreme expressiveness often combined with elements of decorative iteration, they blend with a contemporary formal language that finds its artistic antecedents in early Modernism, in Klee, in Constructivism, in Art Brut as well as in popular culture in general. In many of their typing designs - which associate sculptural patterns with embroidery - elements inspired by the socialist architecture of Eastern Europe, for example. All this gives the work a great originality both formal - for its extraordinary immediacy and, at the same time for the ironic postmodern tendency to quote - and procedural, for the innovative use of media, such as the color woodcut technique used for large format works. In addition to large woodcuts, in which abstract and figurative elements blend, Gert & Uwe Tobias create ceramic sculptures, works on paper (gouache, collages, typed and pen drawings) also mixing various techniques and materials within a single work. The two artists use an unmistakable, intense and luminous palette based, first of all, on the stratification process of color strongly inspired by folklore, even if devoid of any purely decorative character. The use of colors in a logical or totally illogical way with respect to the subject of the image is one of their constant peculiarities. The Tobias work both separately and together, but they always jointly sign everything they produce. Their works, however they are conceived and created, are the result of an extreme visual coherence so that it is possible to speak of visual imagination and perfectly twin formal identity.

These works are part of the project conceived by Scheibitz for the Maramotti Collection in 2011, consisting of a total of three large canvases and a sculpture, where neither the sculpture is a three-dimensional extension of the iconography of the picture, nor the paintings repeat the typology bidimensionally. of sculpture images. While the latter appears as a possible monumental version of a hieroglyph extrapolated from an unknown language, the three works on canvas rather implement an abstract representation that evokes and mythifies the scene and the plastic elements of the supremacist theater and the Bauhaus. In the complex compositional structure of the works of Scheibitz, one of the most significant contemporary German artists (in 2005 he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale), the varied iconic and tectonic elements constitute or allude to abstract, para-geometric transpositions of figures and signs taken from the collective deposit of images that historical visual culture and different media, from advertising to cinema, make available today. In the process of pictorial construction carried out by the artist, these elements are always characterized by an accentuated perspective inscription, which has remained constant in the evolution of his language. An analogous procedure is manifested in his sculptures: the artist hermetically transposes the figures he has collected in the systematic exploration of the collective visual imagination into abstract plastic articulations, evolving the quotation into invention. For this reason he regularly makes works on canvas and three-dimensional structures coexist in his exhibitions.