passages November 18, 2020

Enzo Mari and Lea Vergine (1937–2020, 1932–2020)

I SAW THEM FOR THE LAST TIME a few months before the lockdown. I went over to give Lea a copy of my book on Mario Merz, which she wanted as a gift, and with a dedication. They weren’t well. Enzo was still suffering the aftereffects of an operation on his head necessitated by a fall from a ladder on which he was trying to prune some wisteria on the terrace; Lea, by contrast, had “blundered,” resulting in a nasty sunburn on her legs. Daily life had betrayed them, in short. I left their beautiful Milanese home in a state of sadness at the fact that such two strong personalities, two leaders in

print October/November 2020

Tomoo Gokita

For the inaugural solo exhibition in Massimo de Carlo’s new space on the first floor of Milan’s magnificent Casa Corbellini-Wassermann, built in 1936 by architect Piero Portaluppi, Japanese artist Tomoo Gokita for the first time presented an exhibition of paintings in which color dominates, attributing the change to boredom after years of working almost exclusively in black and white. The works for which he is best known are based on images—often sourced from pornography, comics, or wrestling magazines—that the artist skillfully distorts or partially erases to create abstract compositions that

print May/June 2020

Mario Schifano

Qualcos’altro (Something Else), a gray enamel monochrome from 1962, lent its title to this exhibition dedicated to Mario Schifano’s monochrome period, from 1960 to 1962, when the young artist (1934–1998) first came to international attention. The catalogue was in newspaper format, featuring an essay by the show’s curator, Alberto Salvadori, and Riccardo Venturi. Most of the variously sized works on paper and on paper mounted on canvas featured in the exhibition still belong to Giorgio Marconi, father of the gallerist Gió Marconi. Viewers were able to once again admire, alongside other pieces,

print February 2020

Olu Oguibe

The works in Olu Oguibe’s “Cuba Project,” 2019, which developed out of a visit to a steelworks in Matanzas, Cuba, in February 2019, were made mainly out of discarded metal elements left over from the factory’s manufacturing process. In this exhibition, the artist presented them as he found them, without any modifications, albeit in carefully calculated groupings that suggested he has a scholar’s taxonomic instincts. It was not by chance that his introduction to the show was a display case, Untitled (all works 2019), filled with small rusty objects, salvage on a miniature scale, which he also

print January 2020

Cesare Pietroiusti

This is a strange sort of retrospective. “Un certo numero di cose” (A Certain Number of Things) covers the whole span of Cesare Pietroiusti’s life so far, with one of the titular “things” for every year from his birth in 1955 up through 2019, when the show opened. Thus the exhibition, curated by Lorenzo Balbi with Sabrina Samorì, includes items related to the artist’s childhood and adolescence: report cards, family photographs, letters to Santa Claus, everyday objects. Pietroiusti’s intention was to include works—if that’s what they are—of indeterminate status, suspended between art and non-art,

print November 2019

Gerold Miller

Gerold Miller’s work can be interpreted as existing within a continuous tension between object and space, within a relationship where the artist’s sculptures or wall pieces literally open up to the space that hosts them and deconstructs it. This show featured works in which the space actively breaks the unity of the surface, including examples from several of the thematic series the German artist has been producing for more than a decade. While Miller’s conceptual point of departure is painting, he subjects the fundamental two-dimensional code of pictorial expressiveness to a sort of genetic

print September 2019

Roman Opalka

Like its now-closed opening chapter in Milan, the Venice installment of this extensive exhibition—which remains on view through November 24—features a selection from Roman Opałka’s famous series “OPALKA 1965/1–∞,” 1965–2011, along with earlier works that have rarely or never been seen in Italy. The show hinges on the decisive date of 1965, when, making a commitment that he would stick with until his death in 2011, the artist decided to devote himself to canvases bearing consecutive sequences of diminutive white painted numbers, from one to (theoretically) infinity, which he presented alongside

print May 2019

Giovanni Ozzola

The first room of Giovanni Ozzola’s recent exhibition “Octillion” contained three large, colorful paintings—Light Blue Wall, South Wall, and North Wall, all 2018. To make these works, the artist first used silicone lift an impression from the graffiti-covered walls of abandoned buildings and deserted bunkers along the coast of Tenerife, the Spanish island where he lives. After fixing the sheets of silicone onto wire mesh supports, he intervened with paint and sand, appropriating the anonymous markings, signs of the universal desire to leave a trace of one’s existence, and recontextualizing them

print February 2019

Francesco Vezzoli

One of Galleria Franco Noero’s two locations is right in the center of Turin, on the stately Piazza Carignano, surrounded by historic Baroque palaces that house museums, theaters, and famous restaurants. Perhaps it was precisely as a reaction to all this pomp that Francesco Vezzoli wanted to besiege one of these palaces with something vaguely indecorous. The gallery’s large windows were obscured by heavy curtains, the light from outside replaced by that emanating from a strip of red LED lights running along the baseboards and purple spotlights pointing at the stuccowork and pictorial decoration.

picks January 21, 2019

Leoncillo

In the last decade of his life, Italian sculptor Leoncillo abandoned the figurative mode that had won him acclaim to create abstractions that plumbed his material’s constructive properties and emotional resonances. For this exhibition, curator Enrico Mascelloni has brought together sixteen of these abstract works, each a testament to the master’s empathic approach and unremitting experimentation. Here, Leoncillo, known for his fluency in ceramics, allows the material to speak directly through an agitated modeling that scores the terra-cotta and contrasts it with enamel applied like an autonomous

print October 2018

Giuseppe Gabellone

For this solo show, Giuseppe Gabellone chose an off-site space, installing three works (all Untitled, 2018) at the Fonderia Artistica Battaglia, near Zero’s former location. The two large rooms in a stark, unfurnished industrial space seemed well suited to the extremely sober, almost minimal works that are the artist’s most recent creations. The large windows, moreover, allowed them to be seen in natural light, in keeping with the artist’s usual practice.

Interested in the signifying relationship between a work and its surroundings, Gabellone often inserts his sculptures into the void of expansive

print September 2018

Giovanni Anselmo

Giovanni Anselmo’s recent exhibition “Mentre i disegni misurano, la luce focalizza, i colori e le pietre sono peso vivo” (While Drawings Measure, Light Focuses, Colors and Stones Are Living Weight) took its title directly from works by the Arte Povera artist on view in the first room of the gallery. The series “Mentre i disegni misurano,” created over the course of a decade beginning in 1969, consists of eighteen sheets of drawing paper entirely covered in gray graphite. The artist sees these as details, on a one-to-one scale, of the word infinito (infinity), imagined as infinitely large. The

Giorgio Verzotti