The Pattern Room of the Maramotti Collection hosts the project by Andriu Deplazes entitled Burning Green , the first solo exhibition in Italy of the young Swiss artist, based in Marseille.

In the corpus of over thirty works, most of which created specifically for this exhibition, Deplazes develops his formal and conceptual approach to painting, dealing with a larger scale of work and with unprecedented methods of production and installation.

The dramatic imagery evoked by the title of the exhibition, declined in an original style that reworks signs and atmospheres of Western painting between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century - from Art Deco to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, from Ferdinand Hodler to Pierre Bonnard, from Käthe Kollwitz to Francis Bacon and Nancy Spero – connects both with the themes and technique of Deplazes' research.

The "burning green" can be a reference to the landscape, to the environmental crisis and to the aggressive exploitation of the territory, as well as to the elements that refer to the military sphere present in some of the new works or to the traces of fluorescent colors that characterize the works of the artist.

Within an articulation of the space specifically designed for the exhibition, Deplazes populates the room with sculptures, walls and windows with paintings on canvas and works on paper and plaxiglass, inviting the visitor to embark on a journey of discovery in which the works are revealed by crossing intimate worlds organized by successive moments.

In Deplazes' work emerge echoes of personal experiences and fragments of current events intertwined according to two primary research guidelines: the role of the human being, from a philosophical and anthropological point of view, both in its social dimension and in relation to nature.

Starting from an interest in the investigation of identity issues and in the reworking of power schemes within societies and family structures, the artist places his alienated human-humanoid figures, often isolated, diaphanous and with indefinite features, in alienating domestic interiors or in contexts dominated by the strong presence of nature. Nude, deformed and apparently vulnerable, these androgynous subjects offered to our gaze are at the center of a reflection on the perception of oneself and one's body, questioning the common morality and the extremes connected to voyeurism and narcissism.

Veined with melancholy, tightrope walkers suspended between narrative presence and physical evanescence, his characters embody archetypes of a humanity that questions itself and questions us, with ironic determination, about identity, social dynamics and the condition of man in the present, in relation to an environmental context, plants and wild animals or, more often, already anthropized.

The ecological crisis, the consumption of the landscape through forms of extensive agriculture – but also its weakening through stereotyped narratives–, the romantic conception of the relationship between man and nature, the concept of wilderness, man in nature, nature of man and the nature of Nature: all this is part of what Deplazes transforms into works that are both critical and dreamlike, before which the feeling of unease is accompanied by empathy, a perception of familiarity with what we recognize as inherently human.

On the occasion of the exhibition, a book will be published which will include a conversation between the artist and Julian Denzler, curator at the Museum zu Allerheiligen in Schaffhausen; and texts by Anna Deplazes, senior researcher and project leader for the University Research Priority Program Global Change and Biodiversity (URPP GCB) at the University of Zurich (UZH) and art critic and independent curator Davide Ferri.