On Monday 25 October, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art inaugurates the Ettore Spalletti exhibition. The sky in a room, curated by Éric de Chassey and in collaboration with Studio Ettore Spalletti, the first to celebrate the great master of contemporary art a few years after his death in 2019.

A highly selected corpus of works, including painting and sculpture, rewrite the spaces of the Central Hall, transforming it into a landscape that expresses the meaning and scope of Ettore Spalletti's artistic research, protagonist of a solitary journey characterized by traits of uniqueness in the history of Italian contemporary art, since, starting from its beginnings in the seventies, it has gone through the whirlwind of the avant-gardes from a detached, original and strongly coherent perspective.

Rigorous choices and a very clear visual education have placed a limit on primary geometric shapes and colors of choice, such as blue, white, gray, pink and purple. The same goes for the sculptural forms, such as the column, an element of tradition, the ellipse, the basin and the amphora. But it is a limit that tends to infinity, where the artist's golden rules have the power to amplify the expressive power of his works, from the drafting of pure color to the studied interactions with surfaces and environmental dynamics.

The blue color, which dominates the exhibition, in the form of monochrome occupies the space and invites the viewer to immerse themselves in this landscape and take part in an emotional experience. The vibrations of the blue color follow the variation of light and atmospheric situations, while also the time of the observer acquires a meditative dimension. The presence of a metaphysical tension that characterized Spalletti's research, on an artistic and personal level, is therefore evident. The questions about the incorporeal dimension that the artistic object possesses imply a deep spiritual involvement, the same that guides it in the intent of translating the supernatural into something tangible, of bringing the sky into a room.