ICA Milan Foundation in collaboration with Pompeii Commitment. Materie Archeologiche presents the exhibition A breeze over the Mediterranean, Simone Fattal's first solo show in Italy (Damascus, 1942).

Among the most important contemporary artists, Simone Fattal was born in Syria and raised in Lebanon. She fled the country in 1980 when the civil war broke out, she moved first to the USA and then to France, where she currently lives and works.

Fattal's research has developed and established itself in particular in recent decades, articulating itself in the use of different means of expression including drawing, painting and, since 1988 (when the artist attends the Art Institute of San Francisco), ceramic. In his works the artist brings out from the matter, such as the natural and living clay of clay, forms that evoke the union between the carnal and mystical dimension, reality and imagination, shaping figures that restore the deepest intimacy of our feelings and our thoughts and connect them to the historical and cultural dimension to express the value and, at the same time, the delicacy and fragility of human life.

Following a long research process carried out in the last two years, Fattal has studied the universal history and the multiple individual stories of Pompeii, drawing inspiration from Pompeian artefacts, their cultural, religious, social and historical archetypes and their mixture of mineral, vegetable and animal elements of which they were originally composed and the cultural functions that were attributed to them, before they became fragments in which all distinctions between life and death, myth and history, natural and cultural, human and non-human are canceled.