Rea! Art Fair 2022 Catalogue

ReA! Art Fair 2022 Catalogue

Published by REA ARTE Associazione Culturale www.reafair.com info@reafair.com

Copyright: ©REA ARTE

Creative Director: Pelin Zeytinci Catalogue Editor: Maria Myasnikova Catalogue Design: Ilaria Castelli Catalogue Cover Artwork: Ksenia Lyasota

ISBN: 978-88-945714-2-4

ReA! Arte is a cultural association founded in 2020 by a group of young art professionals. We share the common desire to promote art and culture by supporting emerging artists and creatives through our main project - ReA! Art Fair. The objective is to guarantee independent artists’ accessibility to the sector and fair opportunities by bringing the public closer to an inclusive and transparent art market we create through the Fair. ReA! democratises the Art Fair model, helping emerging artists take their first steps within the art market. In a market dominated by gallery activity, where art education does not prepare emerging artists for entry into the art world, they find themselves without any network to support them. We respond to their needs and act as a bridge between independent emerging artists (those without a gallery representation) - and the art world. Furthermore, ReA! encourages a one-to-one dialogue between artists and the public. Our team supports young talents and is working towards transparency within the art world. A new exhibition / Fair model helps break down bar riers with the public. We have created an innovative association that adopts a new hybrid exhibition model between international Degree Shows and Art Fairs. The curatorial approach structures the event as a single, organic exhibition that leads visitors to discover new talents through an interactive and multimedia path.

There is no room for a vague and distracted view of reality in such a complex and disillusioned historical period. In their way, the artists at the Fair question

their surroundings, often ironically; some deliberately bordering on kitsch, others poetically and contemplatively. Continuous references to dystopian worlds where nothing is certain and any conviction has given way to insecurity, but also distant cultures that merge with the desire to create bridges within a society that never before has sought to share and a collective struggle of ideals. The third edition of ReA! not only wants to outline the panorama of today’s emerging Art but pursues the intention of teasing the spectators’ minds with questions to which there are no predefined answers. Unexpected chaos of emotions, visions and interpretations, singular and personal, where remaining indifferent is impossible.

The curatorial selection proudly maintains a chaotic spirit, free from the usual narrative schemes, showcasing this year’s selected artists. They will go on to establish themselves in the future to give their increasingly sophisticated audience the complex image of the younger international art scene. There are no categories other than the need to overturn everything constructed by previous generations, to open up new solutions, or not to give them at all, because it is above all through imagination that we acquire perception, understanding and hope.

Great artists have always reflected and contri buted to defining new identity models due to society’s assimilation of technological and social changes with each subsequent historical revolution. Those evolving scientific and collective alterations that are reshaping

our conceptions of self and social behaviour still have a significant impact on artists. With a strong focus on the future, they try to match the profound transformations we are experiencing, by developing new ethical, social and cognitive systems, while learning to think about our selves in new ways. The aim is to investigate the same questioning of traditional conceptions of consciousness, humanity, and self-identity occurring in society but with a new outlook on an outdated institutional structure. By questioning a world heading towards climate collapse, led by values and systems that encourage consumption and thrive on colonial inequality, the 100 featured artists not only challenge this framework but show that an alternative path is possible. By proposing multiple possible visions of a radically different planet, they picture a world that prioritises the connection with other species and that embraces a non-human-centred community. The objective is the one of proposing a new definition of economic and technological growth, inspired by and in support of nature, and embracing novel fluid identities.

Tracey Emin once said: “Modern Art is merely how we terrorise ourselves”. Emin is still engaged in her artistic endeavours, and the theme of her work—physical identity as expressed through emotional and spiritual suffering—remains central to her practice. The concept of identity intrigues many contemporary artists, and most of them are engaged in its exploration without even knowing it. This interest can be manifested in various artistic expressions - through painting and sculpture, digital Art, installation and performance - all of which

you shall find in this year’s edition. We want the viewers to participate actively in the Fair and engage with the artworks on emotional, philosophical and existential levels because only through openness and vulnerability can we achieve shared emotion. Interact with the works openly and genuinely, without judgement, but rather by focusing on how you feel because Art is what can unite us all. Art permits social standards to be broken, which gives spectators a means to share the human social condition - and this is our goal.

ReA! Curatorial Team

Rooy Charlie Lana and Giulia Zulian, are an artistic duo, who established a collective entitled -ness in Venice in 2019. -ness generates ideas and practices as the Transghost identity is conceptualised and systematised through visual-performative arts and queer studies. Trans - often short for transgender, is an umbrella term; in addition to including people whose gender identity is the opposite of their assigned sex (trans men and trans women), it may also include people who are non-binary or genderqueer. The inquiry into Transghost identity is conducted by building on the critical studies of Austen, Butler, Foucault, Muñoz, and Preciado. In 2021 -ness released the Transghost Manifesto for Kabul Magazine. -ness won the call for La Biennale di Venezia - Biennale Teatro’s production in 2021 with the site-specific performance On a Soli tary Beach. Aard Uork, Teatro India, Art Verona, Centrale Fies, Spazio in Situ, and La Biennale di Venezia are a few of the major shows that -ness has participated in.

The act of performing is an invitation to question the naturalness and stability of labels like male, female, man, woman, he terosexual, homosexual, and transsexual, as well as how we define and practi se ourselves. Who are we today? When we identify ourselves, who are we? How did the conception of our sexuality develop? We challenge the presumptive and stereotypical levels of truth about bodies, sexuality, and identity as we establish their definition.

There are three works presented by -ness during the Fair:

I Know Some Parts of My Fav P0rn Performer. In my recollection or imagination, sexuality re sembles a film comprising fragmented pictures, details, and body parts Paul B. Preciado. Tran sghost displays their sexual desire in this 12-shot sequence just like a real-life modern pornstar or erotic dream might.

It Does Not Rain in P0rns from Ghost Letters from Speechless Desires. Trasnghost’s motivation is hidden via a secret language that was created. It Does Not Rain in P0rns is a lengthy phrase that may be read amid the numerous curving forms that make up the alpha bet of signs. If rain represents desire or an analogy for the fluids used in sexual activity, then it never showers from the sky in pornography.

Sex Dreams Holder. Even in the household, sexual desire has a hidden place. Along with ghosts and monsters, perhaps the mysteries of pleasure are hidden under the bed: slats that jump, sexual toys, hidden desires.

Text by Maria Myasnikova

*All rights reserved by -ness. Art Director – Rooy Charlie Lana. Fashion Research and Styling – Giulia Zulian. Performer – Cillawinston aka Alessia De Francesco. Photographer – Evelin Mazzaro.

Ekaterina Adelskaya (b. 1988) is a Russian artist with Ukranian roots who lives and works in London. She attended the Russian State University of Cinematography (2007 – 2012) and the University of Hertfordshire & British Higher School of Art and Design (2016 –2019). Ekaterina has participated in various UK, Russia, and South Korea exhibitions. The 5th London Art Biennale, the 252 Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Fragments of Intimacy at the Glavnyy Prospekt Mu seum in Yekaterinburg, Perspectives at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Gyeonggi-do, and the 168 Annual Open Exhibition at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol, where she won a prize in the watercolour category are some of the notable exhibitions she took part in.

Adelskaya works primarily with clay, fabric, and watercolour; through her artworks, she investigates the possi bilities of materials and their physical characteristics by concentrating on unconventional ways of artmaking like burning, melting, and dissolving. She creates mixed-media pieces, which I would classify as art installa tions, as they blur the line between 2D and 3D, painting and sculpture.

Most of the artist’s biomorphic creations are meant to symbolise the transience of existence since the process of matter changing is a necessary com ponent of life itself – “We adapt, thrive and decay in a constant flow of change”

ADELSKAYA

The viewer is encouraged to connect with the artwork, feel its wholeness and deterioration, notice a parallel between life and decay, remembering and forget ting, and get lost in it through the wholes burned in the fabric, patches of the un painted surface, and numerous layers.

Nine artworks are displayed during the Fair: “Eight phases” and “Melancholy 2”. Eight small paintings represent the moon’s phases, exploring the alleged relationship between a woman’s body and the lunar cycle. They are painted on canvas in a gentle pink watercolour tone, referencing feminity and accentuating physical qualities. At the same time, grey and green hues evoke a sense of melancholy, alluding to how the moon’s phases cyclically influence behaviours and moods as they gradually intensify to create the full moon.

“Melancholy 2” is placed at the centre of the eight artworks – to me, it is a mani festation of the completed lunar cycle, with its layers revealing its core; there’s a certain magneticity in a way that Me lancholy 2 lures you in, you almost can’t resist it.

Text by Maria Myasnikova

MARIA ALLEGRETTI

Maria Allegretti (b. 1998) is an Italian artist living in Milano, mainly working with video and writing. While studying philosophy, she expands on her frui tful artistic research, which since 2018 accrued her numerous awards and allowed her to take part in two artist residencies, the last one at Fabrica (Treviso) ended in February 2022.

Allegretti is attentive to the aspects of emotional manifestation; the artist’s research focuses on topics such as mental health and observations on the labour industry’s infrastructures and their correlation. Various life situa tions are often analysed by the artist who intends to conduct a careful investigation of emotional education through her works. Another central question to Allegretti’s practice is how much and to what extent we, as people, are willing to open up to the full range of human sensations.

Through the creation of intimate settings and the use of various langua ges, from visual to spoken, her work investigates a broad spectrum of ways of communicating, sometimes clear while sometimes interrupted. And yet, according to the artist, answers can always be found through trials and er rors. The artwork presented at the fair, “Lettera d’amore”, represents precisely the beginning of one of these attemp ts, as it seeks and stages a language between the human and the digital. By including AI technology, this video hints at a new possibility of interaction to bring unknown sensations to life or suggests the possibility of experien cing already known facts in a novel and different way.

The message has a positive tone, suggesting feelings of hope, care and mercy. At the same time, Allegretti forcefully urges her viewers to attentive emotional participation that leads them to experience what her art can only sug gest; by venturing into her work, seen as a guiding star, the hidden secrets of her practice are revealed. As the artist would say when talking about her cre ative process: “I’m in love with the images and words that make me feel goosebumps. While I look for them, I try to express my idea of this world, hoping it’s clear, always growing and - in the best of cases - wrong.” Lettera d’amore is, in fact, the actualization of a peculiar feeling of love that will continue in a never-ending quest made up by mistakes, which consequently unveils insights about hidden emotions, our frail human self and the world.

Text by Vittoria Martinotti

Maria Allegretti Lettera d’amore

THOMAS ANTONELLI

Thomas Antonelli (b. 1996) is an Italian artist living and working between Veni ce and Friuli. Graduated in Decoration at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts, he is currently enrolled at the Brera Aca demy of Fine Arts in Milan, where he is studying Art Therapy Practices. He has been involved in multiple shows, the most recent one in 2022 entitled Take care of Yourself, which took place at Galleria Stone (Cervignano del Friuli). His initial research is based on picto rial language as a narrative tool. The figures that inhabit his paintings are changeable, constantly transforming and traversing the various stages of human growth.

Antonelli’s painting investigates everyday moods, in which identification is easy. At the same time, the canvases are pervaded with alienating elements, transporting the protagonists into a world poised between reality and fiction. In Non posso stare più con me, the two central figures are immer sed in a forest devoid of references, which is intended to emphasise the couple’s intense state of loneliness and bewilderment. The two lovers become a metaphor for the theme of relationships and their durability. The two bodies, united but facing each other, stage a game of seduction and control. The artist questions the durability of love relationships; does it depend on the ability to find the pro per distance from the other’s world? And how much can binding oneself to someone affect the life of one and the other?

A closer look at the naked, reclining woman reveals that she is faceless, an expression of a process of psychological annihilation and complete subjugation of her own identity, common in some relationships. The artist says: “I believe that ‘Non posso piu stare con me’ represents the underlying anguish felt by both of us, although love in all its forms, even the most desperate, is sweet, and there is nothing else that can make you feel so alive. The pursuit of happiness can be traced back to the individual, and without this awareness first, everything escapes”. The imaginative part is even more intense in the second painting, Era solo ieri. But in most of his works, Antonelli juxtaposes the real world with magic, representing what may seem like a dream. The simple image of something inexplicable beco mes an expedient that the artist uses to project the viewer into an ideal world where anything is possible — a sort of emphasis on our lives and dreams.

Text by Erica Massaccesi

RONG BAO

Rong Bao (b. 1997, China) is an interna tional artist currently living in London and completing an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. She pre viously studied Public Sculpture at the China Academy of Art and, in 2021, completed a BFA in Sculpture at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. Since 2017, he has held group exhibitions between China, the UK and the US.

The artist’s research is constantly oriented towards anthropological and cultural concerns, focused on obser ving the implication that tradition and modern practices have on everyday life. “My works are inspired by ready-made objects, about which I want to talk about the power behind the apparatus. My work starts with a strange incident in my life that catches my attention; they are events that are united by a sense of contradiction and conflict that generates a feeling that I tran slate into visual language”. Through the manipulation and recontextualisation of ready-made objects, Bao highlights how things are too often characterised by an imbalance between form and function, where the former prevails over the latter. By inverting a functional object in an alienated context, the artist intends to discuss the uncertainty of the physical senses, the irrationality within mainstream culture and the resistance of socio-political factors through humour and self-mockery, thus making a solid criticism of the everyday practice.

Casting my teeth to give a dead animal bone alive presents the jawbone of a mammal the artist found on the bank of the River Thames. The casts and castings of Bao’s teeth were inserted in the place of the two missing teeth, which causally fit perfectly. “Humans in the post-human era use technology to borrow organs from animals to prolong their lives. The successful transplantation of a pig heart indicates the success of a medical technique that revolves around the theme of human neutrality. I aim to flatter people in this discourse by implanting my teeth into a dead animal bone, decentralising humans and obscuring and even causing a barrier between humans and the environment. I have contributed to this content. In this con text, I am the contributor.”

Text by Laura Pieri

Rong Bao Teeth

Mammalian lower jaw bone, foam clay, resin 11x23x4 cm

Antonio Barbieri (b. 1985) is an Italian artist based in Grosseto. He holds a degree in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence in 2010 and is currently a lecturer in 3D modelling and printing. Fascinated by new te chnologies, he focuses on their ap plications in artistic practice, finding a balance between figuration and abstraction. His latest projects include Genetica Della Forma (Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2022), Organic Architectures (Offi cine Chigiotti, Grosseto, 2021), and There is no wind on the Moon (Contemporary Cluster, Roma, 2020).

Barbieri’s poetics are based on obser ving and manipulating natural forms through 3D modelling. His works re sult from a careful taxonomic study of the plant kingdom, which the artist breaks down and reinterprets, creating complex three-dimensional models of a fractal nature - a set of modules repeated ad infinitum to create highly complex forms from relatively simple objects. The use of technology, therefore, is the basis for the conception of all his works, from sculptural to two-dimen sional, such as prints on aluminium.

Gyromitra is a plastic work created by joining different 3D-printed elemen ts and assembling them. However, if usually, his artistic research starts by scanning natural forms and then tran sforming them into something else, here Barbieri has begun from a formula, a primary code, to construct an object that could be visible.

“The contribution of oil colour is, first of all, to provide a pictorial depth to work, in addition to the fact that I wanted to find an expedient to uproot the perception one has of sculpture from an overly ‘technological’ dimension and infuse it with a more enigmatic and indeci pherable sense”. The Sculpture refers to a primordial living being, a myocyte emerging from the rock.

With Fractal Landscape #1, however, the ar tist intends to express the immateriality of digital form and its infinite complexity. “Thanks to technology, we can analyse and transform everything we see into data, but I am interested in the opposite, that is, in crea ting something new through reengineering all those intrinsic qualities of nature. The result is reminiscent of our world but always altered, distorted”.

Text by Erica Massacessi

Antonio Barbieri

(chimaera n.14)

MICHELE BAZZOLI

Michele Bazzoli (b. 1996) is an Italian visual artist currently based between Amsterdam and Milan. After graduating in Painting from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, he earned a Master’s in Visual Arts & Ecology Futures at the Master Institute of Visual Cultures in Hertogenbosch, Netherlands. His works have been exhibited interna tionally, and recent exhibitions took place at Zaza Ramen (Milan, 2022), Galleria Arrivada (Milan, 2021), DOOR (Dordrecht, 2021), SK Galerie (Solingen, 2021) and 9hrs Capsule Hotel (Tokyo, 2019). During 2022 - 2023 he will par ticipate in the pan-European project De Structura and the art residency program at MARC, Amsterdam.

Bazzoli’s artistic research is deve loped through a heterogeneous variety of media, from sculpture to installation, drawing to written text, and investigating the relationship between man and nature within the anthropocentric vision of the Western world. Starting from the current debate on ecology, his works further question the relationship that man creates with the human-made environment, the non-human and the artificial reality that surrounds him.

Bazzoli explains his practice with these words: “Different materials give shape to semi-autonomous structures and images that simultaneously repel and intertwine, at first recalling each other’s formal trends, now abruptly interrupting them. Suggesting decay and organic growth at once, they form a single element with an ambiguous character, recalling anatomical details of a gaunt and transformed body as much as fragments of a hypothetical architectural element”.

In his latest works, the artist examines the in-betweenness dimension, merging content and container, display and subject. The work presented at the exhibition is conceived as a hybrid of sculpture, painting and drawing, offering itself as a speculative representation of the relationship between man and con struct and, at the same time, man and material reality, always in connection with the surrounding environment and nature. Thus, the artist evokes a state of formal ambiguity, questioning even the concept of the frame as a spatial delimi ter of an image.

Text by Erica Massaccesi

ILARIA BENVENUTI

Born in 1992 in Urbino, Ilaria Benvenuti received a Bachelor’s Degree in 2018 at the Academy of Fine Art of Urbino, began a path of painting and then changed with a two-year course in decoration and contemporary visual arts. In 2021 she participated in the online exhibition “In the jaws of the unspoken” at Samma Gallery and the group exhibitions “In dreams begin responsibilities,” Galleria Adele Cappelli, Urbino (Italy) and “Éspero sommerso” in Fermignano (Italy).

Benvenuti moves from mere research on human impulses undertaken through the medium of painting to later contextualizing this research in the transitional period that the techno logical generation is experiencing and finding its form of expression in the object. It is precisely the hybridization between organic and mechanical, real and virtual, that highlights the plastic differences between humans and technology. In this sphere, the artist seeks to restore that tension, between organic and machine, through an investigation of the object and its neutral sexuality, as Mario Perniola would define it. The desire that lurks within her artworks, which pushes it to the limit with the organic while having no carnal sexuality, manages to disregard time and live in the inorganic fabrics.

Within Benvenuti’s installations, this kind of tension and the contrast and collision of materials visually restore the possibilities and capabilities of the hybridized object. An interchange between human, object, and technology.

Latex, furs, viscous masses, and cables are assembled into indefinite organic forms that we are drawn to, capture us, and seem capable of simultaneously encompassing and repelling the viewing audience.

The work Ssssssss in my mind, is a pro pelled movement performed by a sex machine stripped of its function and recognizable elements that strikes a very soft, liquid-filled ball of latex that in turn creates repetitive refraction and movement as well as a very ambiguous noise. The artist defines the installation as a “cyber-sex object” that carries with it ele ments of irony and disquiet. It embodies the organic through the inorganic that is propelled to vitality through the primary drive forms. The anthropological likeness of the object and the overlapping and mixing of natural movements and me chanical components merge until the sensory perception of matter is lost.

Text by Milena Zanetti

SWEN BERNITZ

Swen Bernitz (b. 1970, Germany) is a self-taught artist and member of the BVBK Brandenburg Association of Visual Artists. Since 2008 he has been carrying out long-term conceptual projects in documentary style on the topics of the built environment, citysca pes and modern urban development. Since 2018, he has participated in competitions and exhibitions, which have led him to apply for and win several awards.

The unifying element of his photo graphs is the subject, namely the built environment in all its facets, which he photographs and later edits digitally. The artist works exclusively in series; the work presented at the Fair is part of a more extensive work entitled The Photographer’s House.

“Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy experimented extensively with the medium of photography and is considered one of the most influential theorists of the New Vision. When he moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1926, he and his wife Lucia Moholy moved into one of the new mansions. In the last days of the war, in March 1945, the house was destroyed. From 2011 to 2014, the Moholy-Nagy Master House was rebuilt as part of an urban restoration project. The ar chitecture firm Bruno Fioretti Marquez (BFM) designed the architecture of imprecision to attract what is remembered. The curvature of the house has been reconstructed in exposed concrete, but all those details that would indicate the exact scale have been omitted, and the internal articulation has been reduced as much as possible.

The series shows the new manor house in the experimental pictorial style of the New Vision, the visual aesthetic of László Moholy-Nagy. Multiple exposures, negative inversion, solarisation, chiaroscuro motifs and photomontages are used to emphasise the gradations of light and provide a new look at the architecture of the building.”

Text by Laura Pieri

Swen Bernitz

The Photographer’s House #5

ALESSIO BERTOLO

Alessio Bertolo (b. 1997) is an Italian ar tist living and working between Venezia and Pordenone. He completed his bachelor’s degree in Painting at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts in 2021. Bertolo has participated in various col lective exhibitions in Venice, Bologna and Turin. He has also published two different fanzines, Cosa Rimane (2021) in collaboration with Dario Filippis and Ilaria Miotto as additional work to the exhibition of the same name at Osser vatorio Futura, Turin, and Everybody’s got something to hide except me and my monkey (2021), created by Départ Pour l’Image for the homonymous exhibition at the Giudecca Art District, Venice.

Quick, intense, material brushstrokes. Distorted, erased and unrecognisable figures. Alessio Bertolo’s artistic rese arch investigates the feverish state of irrationality that pervades the subjecti ve perception of individuals who are victims of neurosis and monomania. Through a pictorial process that tends first to add figurative elements and, in a second moment, to erase all references, the artist arrives at the total loss of the represented image.

“The paintings are made in stages,” he explains, “there is an initial layer where I sketch out subjects, taking inspiration from film frames, video games and archive photos, after which I cover and erase that initial image with another pictorial material. I sketch something in that layer, but this time it remains less recognisable. I proceed in this way until I feel it is necessary.”

Nothing is predefined; Bertolo’s works take shape in the same illogic gestures, leaving it to the materials used - pre dominantly acrylic, oil, plaster, latex or rabbit glue - to define the final result. Neve fradicia, whose very title refers to the second part of Dostoevsky’s novel Notes from Underground, attempts to highlight the mental dynamics of depravity and self-humiliation, enhancing their solid emotional contrast. The desire for inner peace, albeit illusory, triggers in the individual the unconscious process of eliminating all forms of memory from their mind. The tension between desire and act takes shape on the canvas until the irreversible conclusion: an unreco gnisable image generated by removing key elements and symbolising violent unreason.

Text by Erica Massaccesi

Alessio Bertolo Neve fradicia

LUCA BRAMA

Luca Brama (b.1992, Erba) lives and works between Lecco, Bergamo and Milan. Brama has had a solo show entitled INDOOR at GiacomQ in Ber gamo in 2018 and has participated in several group exhibitions such as; Premio Nocivelli finalists show in 2018, Brescia, SUBSTRUCTURE and FOL DER_01 in 2017, Bergamo, International Festival of Schools of Art and Design FISAD, IL SENSO DEL CORPO in 2015, Torino. In 2016 he participated in the LA MANO OCCULTA workshop and group exhibition by Cristian Fogarolli, Bergamo and in 2017 he was an artist in residence at GiacomQ, Bergamo.

Luca Brama works mostly with the photographic medium to investigate his personal environment, wider social setting and surroundings, rave and counter-culture. Capturing familiar faces, places and vernacular habitat, Brama composes an intimate diary by documenting actions or distin guishing features of youth-oriented subculture in his region. “I am attracted to the displacement of the norm: both the small anomalies of the everyday and pathological deviances. I use photography for its intrinsic properties, related to memory, existence, identity and death” in the words of the artist.

A collection derived from True stories are sad is exhibited at the third edition of ReA! Art Fair. The complete series has also recently, in 2022, been made into a book by visual arts book publisher SKINNER BOOX. Totemic towers of large speakers, leftovers and empty warehouses speak of nights past, while interactions between individuals - lovers, friends, strangers - as well as tranquil natural landscapes provide more context to the fragmented narrative of numerous perspectives and disparate worlds told by Brama. These stories preserved and suspended in time through snapshots are sad to the artist for their finality, for their newly-acquired, inevitable condition as relics.

Text by Paola Shiamtani

Luca Brama

True stories are sad photography series 2015 - 2022

ALICE CAPELLI

Alice Capelli (b. 1997) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Milan. In 2016 she obtained a Diploma in Scenography from the Brera Academy, followed by a BA in Painting in 2020 from the same Academy. Alice began to exhibit her works in 2019, with her most recent group show, Umble Jumbel, held in 2021 at the Studio Via Soperga 20 in Milan.

Capelli mainly works with acrylic paint, pigments, and watercolours –through these painterly mediums, she gains access to the gestural sincerity that she’s after – My language is drawn to wrecked, washed-out, dusty qualities that convey a sense of ‘elapsed time. One of her reference points is frescoes, as they manifest a delicate approach to art-making. As Alice creates, she accepts and celebrates mistakes made in the process as they reveal the journey; she favours these rather than simply looking for artificial beauty; these mistakes become the main pro tagonists of her artworks.

The body is an essential element of her artwork: the artist covers parts of her body in latex, gradually removes them, and places them on the canvas. These latex layers with bodily imprints open a conversation about intimacy, gender identity, sexual ambiguity and interaction with other people. Social Body I is a large installation consisting of an iron structure holding up a canvas – it is a personal project where the public and

the private meet and merge, reflecting on the significance of the body, its interaction with the outside world, and the imprints that indirectly represent an identity.

The painted canvas hanging on the metal frame resembles drying sheets; just like those, it contains signs and marks left behind that act as metaphors for a human journey, which is accentuated through fluids and skin cells left on the canvas. Hanging the sheets is a private, intimate gesture, so the artist wants the audience to interact with the artwork by walking underneath it, connecting with this welcoming environment.

Text by Maria Myasnikova

Alice Capelli Corpo Sociale 1 Installation

Structure (iron, plastic wire; h. 2.6 m);

Painting (underpants, pins, acrylic paint, latex and pigments on canvas; 2 x 4 m) 2021

Boris Cassanmagnago (Monza, 1994) works with moving images and explores the languages, shapes and forms they assume nowadays. A documentary approach to reality is the starting point of his productions, which are created as idealized representations of lived or imagined moments.

In 2022, he exhibited at DEGREE SHOW III at Palazzo Monti in Brescia and took part in the FALÍA* art re sidency in Lozio, Val Camonica. In 2021, he held his first solo exhibition, RIPRESE A VUOTO, participating in the 11th edition of ARTDATE, a festival of Contemporary Art that takes place every year in Bergamo. He also con tributed to L’ARCHIVIO COME PRATICA ARTISTICA, a fanzine curated by Dafne Boggeri; been a member of the Young Jury for the International Competition of the FILMMAKER FESTIVAL in Milan; and exhibited his first video at SONO COSE CHE SUCCEDONO, group show curated by Alessandro Mancassola and Bruno Ghislandi at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Luzzana.

Boris’ CHARLEY THE BEAR piece revisits the story of Muhammad Ali’s infamous “Phantom Punch”, thrown against Sonny Liston and resulting in one of the most controversial boxing’s bout in history. Knocking the opponent to the ground only a minute into the fight, the punch was so quick, spectators claimed they never even saw it. To this day, many think the match was rigged.

The artist reconsiders glorified, visual culture representations that are often widely perceived as the absolute and only truth and encourages viewers to think about the ways in which we com prehend popular imagery. While with the passing of time, the documentation of the enigmatic scene has acquired symbolic status, Boris digitally tampers with the video recording in an attempt to peel off the layers of mystification that define the interpretation of this my sterious sport incident by the masses. Digital montage distorts depicted forms and sounds and much is left up to the audience’s imagination.

The line “No one knows when he was born” opens the film, hinting at the ambiguous nature of the protagonist’s legacy. The author empathizes with Liston, while discerning the crucial match that now serves as evidence and relic of a past event. Through text, CHARLEY THE BEAR acknowledges its own condition as reinterpreted video footage, as informa tion among a proliferation of existing representations.

Text by Paola Shiamtani

From the top:

Boris Cassanmagnago CHARLEY THE BEAR film still (x2) 2021

Boris Cassanmagnago CHARLEY THE BEAR visual per la fanzine L’archivio come pratica artistica, a cura di Dafne Boggeri (x1) 2021

GABRIEL CAUTAIN

Gabriel Cautain is a French visual artist currently living and working in London. He trained at UAL - Central Saint Martins, London, where he received his Master of Arts (MA) - in Contemporary Photo graphy; Practices and Philosophies between 2020 and 2022. Previously he graduated from BTK - University of Applied Sciences Europe, Berlin, where he co-taught Bachelor of Arts (BA) - Photography.

Trained in photography, the artist began his experience in the arts as a photographer and then shifted his in terest to different forms of expression such as installations and video. Howe ver, photography remains a starting point for the artist who plays a lot with the figuration of a particular moment of his personal experience related to intimacy and sexuality. At the core of his works is the artist’s experience as he tries to give back to the public his personal experience through the construction of visual metaphors of memories or moments that have characterized the construction of his sexual and affective identity that become ascribable in the collective memory.

8 pm (coming out) installation consists of two banners bearing the words the artist found in a fortune cookie. The phrase was taken as a pretext by the artist to come out to her parents, with whom she precisely disclosed her sexuality on the day to come at 8 pm. The large-scale format elevates the object, transforming it from an ordi nary fortune cookie card into a large, almost sacred piece. Keeping in mind the central concept of Jose Esteban Munoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009), Cautain discusses the idea that queerness is an aspiration toward the future.

This work is a celebration of that aspira tion and queer life in its most mundane details.

Gabriel Cautain’s works are thus intimate and sacred but sometimes playful and ironic. Through self-criticism and self-mockery, they address themes of homosexuality, isolation, and the desire for connection that people may face during their identity construction. Cautain explores queer identity from the most hidden intimacy to reveal the limits of the visible and memory. His installations are very often composed of superficial material that we find in any person’s everyday life, such as clothing, applian ces, or billboards. Through such material, his work manages to be seductive in its simplicity and metaphysical in the way it elevates the banal to something foreign.

Text by Milena Zanetti

ALESSANDRO CAVALLINI

Alessandro Cavallini (b. 2000) lives and works in Milan. He is attending the third year of visual arts at NABA, Milan. During his years of study, he participated in competitions such as Barlassina Open Art in Bergamo and Bacteria Art organized by Naba in col laboration with Urbonas. He recently exhibited during the group exhibition (im)possible ecologies at the Botanical Garden in Rome. Last year, however, he participated in the group exhibition at Spazio Wanda in Rimini (Italy) and MAD magadino art department (Switzerland).

Cavallini’s research has a strong con nection with anthropology, starting from the thought of Bruno Latour and Edourdo Viveiros, from whom he acquired the concept of territory un derstood not as a set of geographical coordinates but as a relationship of dependence between the human and the place where he lives. In particular, the artist focuses on city suburbs where nature and countryside replace buildings and squares. Territories can be defined as “Temporary Anarchic Zone,” i.e., self-managed places where usual social patterns are no longer recognized. Marginal places are often underestimated within the urban and anthropological landscape.

Inhabiting a place and how it can influence social dynamics and vice versa is material for Cavallini’s poetics, which uses different media to bring his own experience of these territories. Through a mixture of anthropology, ecology and gesturalism of every day, the artist brings back the visual image of a place, a moment or an action rea lizing a vibrant and critical art towards social models, new or past.

In the artwork Strumento, Alessandro Ca vallini isolates a moment and a gesture. The audience is invited to scoop the pesto into a pot with bread. The action of the Scarpetta and the motion of sharing by eating the bread soaked in sauce activate the installation that includes the audience in itself by expanding a family system within a collective dimension. This action thus circumscribes the on tological condition of sociality and how much this is measured and commanded by the structural mechanisms of the contemporary. By bringing audiences from different contexts to cooperate and share a moment of intimacy in the wrong place, they move inquiries into the hierarchies of priorities of collectivity while exalting its importance as a primary element of human social texture.

Text by Milena Zanetti

Strumento

Live installation

Arugula pesto, tableware, bread Variable dimensions 2022

Alessandro Cavallini

VALERIO CESARANI

Valerio Cerasani is a screen printer Born in Gallarate, Italy, in 1990. He is currently based in Berlin. He trained at the Brera Academy, where he had the opportu nity to learn the techniques of manual printing. In 2018 he was a Finalist in the 10th edition of “Premio Nocivelli”, Verola nuova (IT). Exhibitions he participated in include “Life is a luminous halo” | AGA LAB Online exhibition #5 (2021); Exhibition with Maarten Schuurman, “Soft Opacities,” At De Bouwput Gallery, Amsterdam (2020) and Group exhibition “Kunst in der Fabrik,” Oberbruch, (2019).

The artificial space we are used to experiencing as the only knowable place is the urban space and its orga nic planning. The artist, in this context, questions the collective perception of such reality and whether it influences our movements and behaviour. Cities and their landscapes are indeed the instruments of control of the territory to pursue its transformations con cerning the common good, but such organised space is not designed to be experienced. Some places remain liminal or exclusive of passage.

Cerasani’s work starts from these as sumptions and develops through the photographic study of the landscape around him and then turns to the digital with which the artist has the oppor tunity to rethink and conceive new urban structures that reflect a vision freer from imposed architectures to open up to new imagery. The use of overlapping lines, angles, and planes suggests a reversal of place and emphasises the possibility of change: images are traversed by “visual scaffolding” that breaks reality, offering the viewer to look better/inside.

The diptych Poco- diptych I/II exhibited at the Fair is the product of processing a series of images then silkscreen printed on a semi-transparent acrylic sheet. Photos of a supermarket are superim posed on the convenience store parking lot bringing out a harmony of shapes and colours not usually associated with such subjects. Spaces that are uncharacte rized subjectively and anonymously are stripped of their context specificity, making them unreal spaces in which new labels and functions are thoughtful.

The diptych is part of more extensive research dedicated to the zones of consumption and encounter that cha racterise today’s society and represent the desires of an increasingly fast-paced logistics creating new geographies.

Text by Milena Zanetti

Valerio Cerasani

Poco- diptych I/II 2021

UV print and screen print on acrylic 30 x 40 cm each

I

II

YINGMING CHEN

Yingming Chen (China, 1997) received a BA in Fine Arts from the City & Guilds of London Art School in 2020 and later completed a two-year postgraduate course in sculpture at the Royal College of Art. Since 2018, he has produced a series of exhibitions, including ACall festival - The Politics of Physicality, Ne til360 in London in 2021; We Won’t Stop Showing, SET Woodwich, Lapped seams & Silver linings, Standpoint gallery and Fridge Group show, Anderson Con temporary in London in 2022.

Chen’s artistic research looks at the dynamics of contemporary society and, in particular, at analysing the si milarities of seemingly different social contexts. In a simple and direct style, he deals with a phenomenon that concerns the community from time to time, juxtaposing materials and techniques associated with traditional Chinese culture with objects and images that reflect modern society. Having lived in China, Hong Kong and the UK, he has gradually discovered how each system wants to control individuals, the means change, but the end remains the same. Aware of being ‘controlled’ himself, he wonders whether all the decisions we think we make based on free will are, in fact, nothing more than the result of values and experiences to which we have been indoctrinated.

The works presented at the Fair reflect the manipulation of objective stan dards by state ideological apparatuses and the impact on people and reality. For both pieces, a dictionary of the Chi nese language - a tool used to control comprehension as a kind of ideological correction - was used and manipulated.

In Dictionary Duster, the symbol of mani pulation and control is entirely cut up and turned into a dusting object, thus becoming one of those objects that in Chinese culture is often used to punish children and correct their behaviour. In Dictionary (Xinhua Zidian 10th ed), a va cuum-sealing bag is the dictionary used by the artist when he was studying at school: “The work involves deconstructing the dictionary by cutting up each word and its syllables, interpreting the meaning, sample sentences and usage - including 415 syllables and 8,697 words in total - all of which are vacuum-sealed in bags to isolate and prevent deterioration. As a former user, I broke down this politically charged reference book and all its indoctrinating ‘objective standards.”

Text by Laura Pieri

Yingming Chen Dictionary Duster

YIQING CHEN

Yiqing Chen (China, 1996) is a self-tau ght visual artist living and working in London. Past exhibitions include The hidden ghost at Platform China Contemporary Art Institute in 2019, Hello World! at Deep White Studio in Beijing in 2020, Blinded by Science at RCA-Information Experience Design, VR in 2021 and 2:D & 2:4 at WDT Gallery in Middlesbrough in 2022.

His research and work are related to wireless communication technology and artificial neural networks, with the primary aim of investigating the relationship between the state of affairs represented behind these te chnologies and globalisation, politics and techno-culture. His work spans multiple media, from XR to installation and moving images, seeking to redi scover the position of technology in the narrative.

“In the context of the development of artificial intelligence, the project aims to reinterpret technical images to construct another scientific and technological face that contains the vision of the emancipation of human labour. The possibility that the machine could gene rate self-awareness has long been a subject of public suspicion. However, the so-called out-of-control AI is more of a projection of human self-consciousness. In the Frankfurt School’s discussion of technological culture, the machine with artificial intelligence is gradually becoming an individual with thou ght and consciousness independent of the domestication and externalisation of human control. Human consciousness is based on constantly shaping science and technology into a metaphysical image. Therefore, through five fragmented works, I attempt to restore the reality of imaginary technology by describing the machine’s perception of thought.

‘Flickering Breath’ explores the emergence of Li-Fi as a media variant situated in the history of visible light communication. From light worms to Aldis lamps, from lasers to Li-FI, light is equivalent to information. Contemporary light-based automated technical media are typically linked in intricate networks and topo logies, nodes communicating with each other, forming interconnected systems and groups that exist and evolve with us. How can we see the relationship between these technical means and us? The work presents itself as a closed-loop telecommunication system”.

Text by Laura Pieri

Yiqing Chen

designer: Mike Olliston

JUNG SOO CHO

Jung Soo Cho (b. 1996) is a South Korean artist who lives and works between Seoul and Berlin. In 2020 she obtained a BA in Fine Art from the Dongguk University in Seoul and had since participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, with her most recent one in 2022, entitled Like Clouds at KUKUMU e.V in Berlin.

Jung Soo’s artworks combine self-por traits, still life and journals executed with a vivid colour palette. She aims to depict the present through layers of paint: her paintings portray errors, emotions, and numerous other sentiments experienced during the painting process. Through her artworks, Cho explores urban structures and human habits. She pays attention to details from daily life that usually go unnoticed, drawing inspiration from her surroundings, such as leftover di shes, colour palettes, records, books, receipts, tapes, plants, cups, fruits, cassettes, plates, and symbols. The ar tist constantly analyses, searches, and gathers items that have the potential to become a layer on the surface of her works in the same way a nomad, hunter, traveller, chef, or child would.

Every day she feels that she experiences a déjà vu or a sensation of unfamiliarity brought on by being in a confined studio space. Every fragment of time and place around her, whether a simple stroll down the street, a passage read in a book, the weather on a particular day, or the footprints of a passerby, might be used as a motif and source material for her paintings and sketches. “It’s darker outside than it was yesterday. Anticipation. By now, the time has passed, and information has collapsed.”

Text by Maria Myasnikova

Jung Soo Cho Choices

Acrylic and gouache on canvas 120 x 100 cm 2022

FLÁVIA CHORNOBAI

Flávia Chornobai (Brazil,1992) is an Ita lian-Brazilian artist who lives and works in Milan. She graduated in Graphic Design in 2017 from the Universidade do Parana and in 2019 she won a scho larship in Urbino, Italy. At the Academy of Fine Arts of Urbino, she studied Edi tions and Illustration for Art Graphics, obtaining her degree in 2022.

The starting point of Chornobai’s artistic research is the concept of nature, the foundation of existence understood both from a physical and emotional point of view. The study is structured as a constant investigation of the relationships between man and the surrounding environment, the Union and divergence from other living beings and the objects that characterize his own space of action. The artist, however, goes beyond the simple analysis of these Links by in serting the rule element – understood as the series of norms to which we refer based on tradition and expe rience, an orderly and constant way of unfolding that is found in the field of nature or human action. As Flavia inserts the relationship that each of us has with our own rules into the man/ nature equation, the questions arise, the same ones that define the starting point of Chornobai’s artistic practice: the first intent is never to find answers, but rather try to inhabit the questions, ambiguities, contradictions and para doxes that are detected in one’s way of thinking, feeling and living.

Il Gioco con l’origine is the documentation of a game’s performance created by the artist. The purpose is to create a rela tionship between a person and the root. The first participant who forgets to play loses the game. The elements chosen by the artist for the performance are fossils, matches and smoke and the works are the visible result of the three games played. “My idea was to have a device that would allow me to broaden awareness both from my participation in this relationship and from the other party’s participation. But even more important is to understand what allows this relationship, what connects and separa tes us at the same time - culture, language, science... the game should start with at least two participants: you are one of them, the other is the origin”.

How to play:

- Start the game by placing yourself at a certain distance from the origin.

- Use whatever tool is within your reach to launch it to the origin. The instrument can be material, conceptual or spiritual.

- Now it’s the origin’s turn. They need to throw something else at you.

- It’s your turn now.

- The game goes on.

Text by Laura Pieri

LÉA COLOMBIER

Léa Colombier (b.1996) is a French visual artist who lives and works between Paris and Florence. She studied theatre and classical literature while graduating in photography at Speos Institute in Paris and took part in the final group show at Les Rencontres d'Arles, France. She graduated in 2021 in Multimedia Arts at Istituto Marangoni Florence and exhibited at La Mani fattura Tabacchi for her final degree show. In 2022, she was selected for the Digital Summer Show at the MOCDA and will be one of the participating artists of ReA! Art Fair. Her practice thrives in digital art; her work explores fictional, post-apocalyptic worlds that lie between the fields of ethnographic study and science fiction. Colombier creates stories that test hypothetical states of suspension while inhabiting grim, post-anthropocentric spaces. Through video, image, text and sound, the artist wants to engage in a conver sation with her audience and specu late on the near future while evoking our human past.

For the Fair's third edition, Colombier will present "Instead I wrote on a rock", a video installation composed of a two-channel video and installation elements. The work revolves around the artist's conception of a dystopian future on a rocky island inhabited by ominous creatures that keep the viewer guessing what they could be and how they got there. On a second screen, a video game is introduced, offering a guided tour of this barren island. The game's scope is to act as an intermediary that helps us recon struct the events that unfolded from our present to a possible future.

A protocol to follow on this journey in search of new languages and life forms, designed as a nostalgic archive or data base.

By borrowing elements from anticipa tory novels and archival efforts, Colom bier's works are presented as hybrid and poetic science fiction experiments, questioning our relationship with possible terrestrial futures. "Instead I wrote on a rock" stages a hypothetical great leap forward in time and space, imagining transitions between the animal and mi neral kingdoms, as seen on the gloomy life forms encountered while exploring the island. The work explores the darkest derivations of the human condition, from physical to social, while giving a transversal perspective on contemporary challenges.

Text by Vittoria Martinotti

Léa Colombier

Instead I wrote on a rock Video installation 2’17 single-channel video, colour and sound, 7’47 single-channel video colour and sound, reflective fabric 2021

LUCREZIA COSTA

Lucrezia Costa (b.1996) is an Italian visual artist living and working between Milan and Casalpusterlengo. She at tended LABA in Brescia and obtained her bachelor’s degree in photography with a dissertation outlined with the help of mentor Giovanni Gastel. Costa then moved on to her master’s in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA, Milan, where Lucrezia deepened her knowledge and cultivated her in terest in the visual arts. She took part in various exhibitions in Italy and the UK while conceiving and developing a couple of performances commis sioned by MUDEC, Milan. She is one of the artists in residency at ViaFarini, Milan, whilst showcasing her work at “Artefici del Nostro tempo - The milk of dreams”, Venice, as one of the selected finalists of the group show.

Since the beginning, Costa’s practice has been characterized by a laboured selection of elements borrowed from vernacular architecture while suggesting new sustainable ways of inhabiting our planet. She then started to explore the field of geology, investi gating the depth of the earth and how it reflects our human character. Ecology is a theme close to the artist’s heart, as through the study of the “Oikos”, she ventured into a thorough state of physical and mental discomfort that she experiences as an artist and a human being. Through her work, the artist tries to slip inside the cracks of the unknown and bring to the surface lost fragments of the subconscious lost in the abyss of the human mind.

The artists then link her interests in the concepts of temporality and spatiality to the process of physiological decay and its consequential pain, a sentiment shared by all living things on this planet.

Costa presents for this edition of the fair “Rise into decline”, a work that highlights the entropic process and inevitable irreversibility of each lived experience by underlining the fractures found in precarious equilibrium, solid only in appearance. After a careful analysis of matter under stress, informed by geological studies, Costa built a small plaster wall placed on a tiny vibrating platform, equipped with an inventive engine which recreated oscillations and swings similar to the ones experienced in an earthquake. Small cracks can be found on each wall facade, revealing the decay brought by the process, which the artist interprets as openings toward new possibilities and stimuli for further research.

Text by Vittoria Martinotti

Lucrezia Costa

Rise into decline Sculptural intervention and video performance 80 x 80 x 60 cm

VIRGINIA DAL MAGRO

Virginia Dal Magro (b. 1994) is a visual artist who lives and works in Milan—she is currently working as a teaching assistant at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan, where she obtained her bachelor’s degree in Painting in 2016 and a master’s in Graphic Arts in 2019. She is part of spazioSERRA, a non-profit exhibition space in the Lancetti railway station in Milan. Virginia has participated in the Galleri Hammer residency (Aalborg, Danmark, 2022) and the Experimental foto festival (Barcelona, 2022). She was involved in various group and solo exhibitions last year, such as Fai lings, curated by Anthony Cervino and Shannon Egan (Ejctaprojects, Carlisle, Pennsylvania), and Tales from the inside out_the look through, curated by Marta Orsola Sironi (Co_atto, Milan).

Virginia Dal Magro’s artistic research explores reality’s visible and invisible boundaries. Her works take the form of non-places that, while linking to what exists in nature, open up alternative avenues of possibility. “I chose the unexplored ocean floor as my destination to use the knowledge holes in technology as doors to new worlds”. Can I find a way there? is a series of small works that originate as a provocation to the phrase “Can’t find a way there, try again” from Google Maps. The words appear when the app cannot find its way to the place sought. “These dry prints,” the artist points out, “trace the failed stages of 3D prints to portray the unknown through the translation of numerical data.”

Dal Magro’s practice investigates the relationship between opposites - real and imaginary, natural and artificial, visible and invisible - using them as the basis for the creation of most of his latest artistic output. Another constituent element of his works, be they installations, prints, photographs or sculptures, is her experi mentation in processing supporting ma terials. If in Can I find a way there? the artist employs the technique of dry printing on Japanese calligraphy paper; in I CAN BARELY FEEL YOU, she works with an inkjet print on canvas and opaque film, which changes appearance depending on the lighting. Like a treasure chest, these lightweight sheets form a small square room to walk through—an intimate space to question the ambivalence of what is visible on the surface and what lies beneath.

Text by Erica Massaccesi

DARIA DANILOVA

Daria Danilova (b. 1995) is a Russian artist who lives and works in Moscow. She is interested in the meaning of material artefacts, the concept of memory and mortality. We frequently give items an enhanced meaning to keep a priceless memory alive or to prolong the presence of people and animals in our lives: we maintain picture albums, personal artefacts, letters and postcards to sense the presence of our loved ones and memories that we are attached to. Daria concentrates on familiar places, seemingly straightforward items and situations in her photographs. She photographs everyday objects that hold special meaning for her, which can be interpreted as a quest to extend her life.

Initially, polaroids allowed Danilova to keep a private journal, sketch, and swiftly record observations. She then began to use them to look into other subjects she found herself interested in – the act of taking a polaroid has a unique, almost holy value since it cannot be edited. Working with polaroids has its specifics – it is a tangible medium where one has very little influence over the outcome. The artist explores various methods and topics through the polaroids, such as social, economic, and political concerns that impact Russian citizens and institutions. She finds polaroids nostalgic and sentimental, making them a collectable kind of photography; it is also the most honest one – despite the camera having precise settings, how it comes out in print is still unpre dictable and uncontrollable.

Danilova experienced a sense of pro tection when using the polaroid camera as it separated her from the outside world - keeping a journal turns into voyeurism. Additionally, the artist had a sense of de tachment from her life and just regarded the documentation as an event in itself.

Daria spent three years recording what happened to her and around her for the project presented at the Fair entitled Untitled (Diary 2019–2021). She was inspired to create this project after exploring the work of Japanese photographers Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki. From there, she became interested in subjective photography, which was furthered by on-the-go shooting using an analogue camera. Polaroids allow her to capture the moment while giving room for the arbitrary and unpredictable. Her photographs emphasise the intimacy of the experience, while the small format of the photos pushes the viewer to get closer, decreasing the psychological gap between the observer and the work. The blurriness and uneven lighting in her images emphasise the intimacy of the experience – they highlight our commitment to material possessions to preserve memories and elicit nostalgia in the observer.

Text by Maria Myasnikova

Daria Danilova Untitled (Diary 2019 – 2021)

Polaroids 13 x 10 cm each 2022

FORTUNA DE NARDO AND LORENZO PELUFFO

Fortuna De Nardo (b. 1996) is a multidi sciplinary Italian artist. Intimate, delicate and a flower lover, she hides inside her photographs. Lorenzo Peluffo (b. 1986) is involved in sound experimentation and entertainment for Fango Radio. An internet enthusiast, he is interested in non sequential logic and disinterested in (or from) communication. They met while studying at the Albertina Aca demy in Turin, where they were both attending the New Technologies of Art course. They started working together in 2021; their projects were presented at: Athens Digital Art Festival; SPARC* Spazio Arte Contemporanea, Venice; ALC Videoart Festival di Alicante and Associazione Marena, Turin.

The gracious star, which gladly rises before the dawn, And Lucifer is named.

- T. Tasso

The installation presented at the Fair, a site-specific work, is part of the La Grazïosa Stella series. The project stems from an investigation into the themes of the female icon and the body, iconographic and photographic research that the duo undertook by observing the votive aedicules present in the territories of the provinces of Naples and Salerno. Their singular and extremely varied aesthetic, which has undergone many compositional stages over the years - from baroque archi tecture to neon lights - is deconstructed and reformulated. The result is visible in a series of different multimedia in stallations using the various elements that make up these previously photo graphed aediculae.

Their works stage new votive temples, which question the meaning of spirituality between the sacred and the profane while remaining linked to their original function. The two artists explain: "As a transfiguring model of the temple - sacred en closure -, from which it borrows its function as a means for contemplation, the aedicule does not belong to a bourgeois, worldly and phari saical religiosity, made up of Sunday masses in cathedrals, of rulers occupying the pews closest to the altar. On the contrary, it is the mirror of an orphic, popular, pure spirituality."

Rosa Mystica enters into this quest. The installation consists of a central votive image projected via a television set. Around it, neon lights and dried flowers help the viewer feel as if in front of a modern sacred shrine.

Text by Erica Massaccesi

Fortuna De Nardo and Lorenzo Peluffo Rosa Mystica Installation

MARIA CRISTINA DE PAOLA

Cristina De Paola (b. 1995, Uggiano La Chiesa) is an artist based between Milan and Lecce. She graduated from MA Media Arts in 2017 and BA Pho tography in 2022 at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan. She also attended the Willem de Kooning Aca demie for a semester, in Rotterdam. During her studies she carried out two internships, respectively at the Triennale di Milano and Viasaterna. Cristina’s work was shown in group and solo exhibitions such as Museo MA*GA (Gallarate, 2020), BraeraKlasse #5 – IPER INTERNO ESTERNO (Care/of, Milan, 2020), Progetto Spazio Volta Open Cinema (Spazio Volta, Bergamo, 2021), Maratona di Visione (Online show, 2021), Fresh Eyes (Rotterdam Photobook Mar ket, Rotterdam, 2021), I am not sure (Will I ever be?) – (Spacca Studio, Milan, 2021), TRACCIATI (Non Riservato & Cascina Biblioteca, Milan, 2021), DOMANI (Brera Bicocca, Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, 2021), Where my feet stand (Li quida Photofestival, Turin, 2022), Insight Foto Festival (Sala Veratti, Varese, 2022).

Workshops and residency programs include: BoCs Art (Cosenza, 2019), Canon Student Program - Visa Pour l!Image (online, 2019), TRACCIATI (Non Riservato and Cascina Biblioteca, Milan, 2021), In Nature (Transizioni / OMNNE, Lecce, 2021), DE FAULT22 Masterclass, Ramdom and Presidenza of the Regional Council of Puglia, KORA Centro del Contemporaneo (Castrignano de’ Greci, 2022).

De Paola’s multidisciplinary body of work explores specific archaeological spaces in Salento, where she was born and raised, in relation to her personal and contemporary experience of those. When thoroughly studying archival material about such locations, the artist yearns to become more knowledgeable and aware of her own origins. These sites, such as the Grotta dei Cervi that is central to De Paola’s research, me tamorphose as she installs sculptural elements altering the natural landscape. The artist is interested in restoring a har monious and empathetic connection with these places that bear witness to myths, folklore, to centuries of inte ractions with generations of residents or passerby.

Il Mare di Enea is an ongoing project, com posed of photographic prints, 35mm slides as well as seawater, limestone and bauxite gathered in situ. Named after an inlet in Porto Badisco, the title of the work makes reference to Aeneas arriving in Italy, bringing attention to the fact that the cave - depicted in the series - has taken on an abundance of forms, real or imaginary, historical or mythical with time. A light-source in the form of a popular Salento iconographic symbol, illuminates the nighttime scene; a site-specific installation and sculptural intervention documented photographi cally as De Paola encounters the old land anew.

Text by Paola Shiamtani

Maria Cristina De Paola Untitled – part of the series Il Mare di Enea Cotton paper print Bright White 310gr Black basswood box frame

- ongoing

LUCREZIA DI CARNE

Lucrezia Di Carne (b. 1993) is an Italian artist who works and lives in Trento. After graduating from the Libera Accademia di Belle Arti (LABA) in Brescia in 2016, she began her studies at the Brera Academy, where she's currently stu dying for an MA in Fine Art. Lucrezia started showing her artworks in 2015, with her most recent show Mostra di Fine Residenza at Le Garage in Trento.

The concept of the analogue and digital printing processes are the main em phasis of Di Carne's work: her artwork finds legitimacy within the interpretive space of the viewer, as she finds herself compelled to explore it. The goal is to gradually blur the line between human and machine creation; the artist's starting point is photography, and the topics she tends to focus on may be linked back to the complex, rugged, but significant and present region she calls home

"Try to make the rock more hospitable and meaningful by taming it." – is the phrase that Lucrezia used to perfectly and poetically describe the project presented at the Fair entitled Moon Rocks. Moon Rocks is a collection of seemingly cosy drawings resembling the structure of a rock or a rocky landscape; the focus of the project, however, is more complex and comes from the need to convey the dark ties between man and nature and the ongoing battle to control the irrational chaos of nature.

As we experiment with natural and artifi cial artefacts, attempting to make them more intelligible and predictable, we create uncertainty. Di Carne's drawings explore this concept and the tool used for said exploration – with every drawing produced, she gains a better under standing of the technique. The creation of a drawing not only stimulates the production of new ideas but also acts as a challenge to oneself, pushing her to reach the technical limits of the medium she's working in – this is yet another manifestation of human versus nature or rather human united with nature?

Drawing is the medium that allows you to work for brief periods and therefore provides for an adequate amount of time left for reflection – much stimu lated by external natural and material stimuli. From here, the artist's precise and essential technical understanding of the materials she employs leads to an interdisciplinary approach that concen trates on the evolution of both method and matter – this approach is visually manifested in the Moon Rocks series.

Text by Maria Myasnikova

Carne

GIULIA DI FRANCO

Giulia Di Franco (b. 1998, Italy) lives and works between Milan and Istanbul. In 2020 she graduated in Painting at RUFA in Rome and carried out an internship in Istanbul in Beger Akba’s Iskele47 Studio. Following a series of group shows, in 2019, she inaugurated her first solo exhibition, Leave Solid Ground at Pastificio Cerere in Rome. In 2020, she was selected by spazioSERRA to participate in venerazioneMUTANTE, a series of site-specific projects and installations created for the 2021 exhi bition season in Milan.

How much does space condition us, and how much does it directly accu stom us? Di Franco’s research starts from photography and develops with video art and installations: expressive means through which she observes the spaces surrounding her and the interactions there. Through her practice, the artist poses as an impartial observer, experimenting from time to time with different ways of approaching reality – an attitude that leads her to create purely intimate, always disparate collective worlds. “I like to observe the dynamics and how we as a community act and feel. I am particularly interested in profoundly understanding how the human figure is placed in the environment, mixing with it so much as to make the boundaries between the two almost imperceptible. The images I capture are often human figures overwhelmed by what they have around them as they become part of what surrounds them”.

The artwork Salı pazarı takes its name from the homonymous market that takes place every Tuesday in the Kadiko district of Istanbul. The three photographs re present a typical day among the stalls of market fabrics, images that integrate the visual dimension and are linked to movement, capturing the relationship and the complete fusion between place and people. “I was attracted to how some objects were positioned in space in an unusual way for me, and at the same time, everything seemed to move harmoniously. It was difficult to perceive the boundary between the people who walked between the market stalls and the fabrics that hung on them...the latter moved with the wind or were moved by the people themselves. I tried to grasp this very relationship”.

Text by Laura Pieri

Giulia Di Franco

Salı pazarı photo

MARTINA DENDI

Martina Dendi (b.1994) is an Italian photographer and visual artist. She graduated top of her class from LABA, Florence, then moved on to her master’s at L’Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan. Dendi approached photography early and decided to deepen her knowledge and practice throughout adulthood. Her research stems from anthropological studies that merge with the artist’s fascination for the bizarre and ironic in daily rituals and traditions. Dendi is not only the creator of her folkloristic images but also the star of her settings. The artist describes it as a fundamental and therapeutic self-affirmation process that helps her better understand her place in the world. Her work can be described as a unique and intimate visual journal, made up of personal and collective memories, poised on the edge of anti- and hyper- aesthetic.

For Rea Art Fair’s third edition, Dendi presents “Sesso Italiano, Capitolo 1: Dio” the picture, part of the series “Sesso Italiano”, stems from an ironic dissection of Italy as the often-thought country stifled by its stereotypes. The artist was inspired by the most common cliches and the myth of Italianness; Dendi aims to deconstruct those elements mockingly to actualize them in an ever-growing globalized society. The outcome is a visually gruesome and forced portrayal of dated folkloristic aspects of Italian culture.

In Capitolo 1: Dio Dendi depicts the Italian golden age of the 60s, the economic boom and the happier days of prosperity, a forgotten reality that violently clashes with our generation, concerned by the imminent challenges of climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic. Dendi hides in the picture carefully studied symbolic meanings, from the dress she is wea ring, to the food displayed on the table, each one recalling distinct aspects of the time. The awry feeling of suspension is made apparent to the viewer through the plastic, stiff poses of the actors re creating the puzzling setting. The result is a bizarre cathartic release of the re pressed sexuality of the Baby Boomers generation that, notwithstanding the economic freedom, was still constrained by the constant presence of taboos and prohibitions.

Text by Vittoria Martinotti

Martina Dendi Sesso Italiano, Capitolo 1: Dio Digital photograph Inkjet print on coated paper 2020/2021

STEFANO FERRARI

Stefano Ferrari (b. Gallarate, 1996) lives and works between Ferno and Milan. He graduated in Figurative Arts from Liceo Artistico P. Candiani (Busto A.) and he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Visual Arts at the department of sculpture, obtaining a bachelor’s degree. Ferrari has had two solo shows; at Palazzo Martinengo (Brescia), 2021 and during Walk-In Studio (Milano), 2020 and has partici pated in several group shows, among which an exhibition at Palazzo Visconti (Bergamo), 2020. He has taken part in the SpreadMuseum residency in Entrevaux, France, 2021.

Ferrari’s expansive sculptural assembla ges and installations explore multispe cies natural worlds, in-depth examining the ties between interacting organisms and the context they live in. The arthro pod-like, skeletal forms made up of wood, animal bones, industrial material such as plastic, tubes or textile, so lar-powered circuits and fragrances, suggest ways in which we may sustain kinships by observing the behavior patterns of species and creating or preserving spaces in which they may coexist. Gathered entomological and botanical specimens are embedded in these sculptures, which often invite and host insects, providing them with a safe, viable ecosystem to exist in. Ferrari’s research focuses on chal lenging and dismantling hegemonic, man-made structures through con structing empathetic environments, allowing for nature to gradually take its course by occupying his works.

Camouflaged easels take on meticulous insect forms, as the artist investigates parasitism with relation to interspecies cooperation. Ferrari’s works breathe life into an organic mise en scène, the site becoming gradually populated by imaginary flora and fauna, informed by biological communities. On the occa sion of ReA! Art Fair, the artist presents Simbionte (2022), and Snusnu di un UGVs (2020) vigilant, releasing vapor towards the audience at the artist’s command.

Text by Paola Shiamtani

DARIO FILIPPIS

Dario Filippis was born in Venice in 1999. He lives and works between Mestre and Venice. He is currently enrolled in the Painting program at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. He recently exhibited for the group show Non-Playable Character (NPC), curated by Curatorial School Venice in collaboration with The Fairest and for the group show Cosa rimane at Spaziobuho in Turin.

Filippis’ research starts from the objects he encounters in his daily life, which he subsequently appropriates, building a deep connection through the serial reproduction of the same. A method to concretize the relationship with matter and analyze the relation ship with our emotional system.

Starting from the primordial dimen sion of objects, their sacred and spiritual value connected to past civilizations, the artist stages small votive statuettes among domestic pets and funerary urns. Things remain poised between past and present, between fiction and reality but above all, between sacred and profane, in which the toy and the votive object remain indistinguishable. The objects are made with particular attention to the working process that is metho dical and repetitive in which the creative act becomes ritual. Filippis also always adds a narrative charge to these objects by creating fantastic worlds around them in which his objects populate new intimate but inviolable mythologies of a small and silent dimension.

Per quelli che dormono are red earth sta tues that seem to come from an ancient world but at the same time belong to our contemporary experience. Inspired by effigy urns, their eyes closed and their mouths clamped shut; silent, they hold a secret or perhaps a memory within them. Empty tombs that collect gentle thoughts dedicated to all the misplaced affections.

Text by Milena Zanetti

Dario Filippis Per quelli che dormono Clay

ANDREA FIORINO

Andrea Fiorino was born in 1990 in Au gusta, in the province of Syracuse; he lives and works in Milan. He attended the three-year course of Art Graphics and the biennium of Painting at the Academy of Arts of Brera. Andrea has taken part in various exhibitions: Amaro in Bocca at CasaVuota, curated by Francesco Paolo del Re, Sabino de Nichilo, Rome, 2019; Every day like a Sunday, curated by Ivan Quaroni at Antonio Colombo Gallery, 2018, Milan; Della stessa sostanza, curated by Arian na Beretta, Circoloquadro Milano, 2017 and Nel Buio risplendono, curated by Claudia Contu, Ateliermultimedia Ga lerie Artecontemporanea, Vienna, 2016.

Fiorino’s work is developed around three determining elements: sign, colour and narrative. What interests the artist is being able to give back to his audience the different levels of writing and reading that are hidden in the images he constructs. Mixed media on canvas often have an entry key, a word, a short story or an artist’s obsession. Fiorino’s work consists of two phases, the first focusing on drawing that allows him to elaborate on the starting concept and then takes the form of visual notes. These will be transferred to canvas with a careful study of the development of the sign and structure, the choice of colours and the use of pigment. Paintings of infinite interpretations are left to the hands of the audience to appropriate by finding their own story or ending.

The occasion accompanies the two paintings by a backdrop made by the artist himself, which becomes the setting for the staging narrated by the works. Drawings reminiscent of childhood sketches made at the blackboard during recess and that in this context are meant to be a gesture of breaking the known rules of linguistic expression.

The two paintings, on the other hand, are dedicated to the artist’s intimate imagery, which ironically gives us visual metaphors of his experiences related to his sexuality or everyday life but which leave the viewer free to fantasise and continue the narrative, like incipits of stories with an open ending. Characters are thus interpretable as alter-egos that often return within Fiorino’s works to be used as a pretext for staging a narrative on the borderline between the real and the fantastic.

Text by Milena Zanetti

Fiorino Interno su urano

acrylic, pigment on canvas

x 80 cm

Fiorino

acrylic, pigment on canvas

x 80 cm

OMAR GABR

Omar Gabr (b. 1999) is a self-taught Egyptian artist who lives and works in Cairo. The Youth Salon in 2016 and 2018, the Cairo Salon in 2018, Different Melodies in 2019 and Ubuntu Revisited V in 2021 at Ubuntu Art Gallery, and Do cendo Discimus – The showcase in 2021 at Walk of Cairo are just a few of the group exhibits that have included his work. Omar’s two solo exhibits were the Phase at Easel & Camera gallery in 2018 and ABI Park at UBUNTU Art Gallery in 2021. The 1-54 Marrakech in 2020, the 1-54 London in 2020, where he was named one of the top 10 mustsee artists, and the AKAA Fair in 2021 are just a few worldwide fairs he has taken part in. Gabr’s works are held in private collections in the UK, USA, UAE, Egypt, and Morocco.

Within his artistic practice, he expe riments with various mediums and methods, working with painting, sculp ture, and installation. At the beginning of his journey, most of the artist’s projects were personal; however, as he proceeded to paint, he acquired a broader view and began perceiving his personal experiences through the prism of the society in which he lives.

In 2016 he joined the art group Al Laqta, – Arabic for The Shot, where he began using a more academic and for mal approach to work. Omar is aware of the effects of the society he grew up in, including post-revolution Egypt, the internet, and the social media era.

With sarcasm and playful brushstrokes, his figure and portrait-based art fre quently explore human hardships, insti tutional incompetence, and political and social critique.

In his work, Gabr captures the everyday routine in his surroundings by cramming canvases, papers, and other objects with people’s figures, bodies, and gazes. As the artist describes his artworks – I try to show my reality through a playful, critical, and ironic gaze.

Text by Maria Myasnikova

ELENA GROSSI

Elena Grossi’s (b. Rome 1999) interest in art began at a young age, and in 2019 she decided to move to Portugal to study Drawing at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lisbon. She is currently in her final year of the course, and during her training, she had the opportunity to spend a semester at the Universität der Künste in Berlin, initiating her cur rent artistic research. Her first group exhibition at Udk Rundgang in 2021 also dates back to this Berlin period.

Her art is composed of signs, words and sound, creating an abstract image that is as austere as it is poetic. Building a relationship with material and support, Grossi extracts textures from shapes and images taken from reality - details of roughness and softness together with the materiality of objects, beyond their boundaries and contours: “A lot comes from reading. Reading makes me feel the need for some action, a way to ‘go out’ into the world and move through territories. Another thing is sound and the act of listening [...] I am inspired by the geography and archaeology of where I am. I like to play without prose, without characters and storylines; there may be memories of them in my mind, but through the process of drawing, I like to make them foggy, shrouding them in layers of ambiguity or abstraction. I find that the experience I wish to reveal resides spontaneously in the space of a drawing, thanks to its vulnerable yet engaging language. ‘Abbi cura’ is probably the only work in which the narrative persists and becomes the visual core of the composition.”

The starting point of the creative process that led to the realisation of Abbi cura (Take care) was a visual stimulus drawn from reality onto which a powerfully resonant theme, loss, converged. Through graphic synthesis, the artist enacts - now in a more tangible, ephemeral form - the evo cative power of art, starting from a very personal point of view that translates into a universal discourse. The aspect that most interests Grossi is investigating the experience of losing oneself. Amidst a vast matrix of grey matter, a flat stone-like surface made of graffiti, “thoughts have become rectangular symbols and fragments of shapes that look like familiar rituals and archi tecture, that seem like confused fragments of memory lying around, floating without moving. [...] a vibrant constellation of forms articulated around the words, which the viewer can explore”.

Text by Laura Pieri

Elena Grossi Abbi cura

media on paper

QIKAI GUO

Guo Qikai (b. 1995) is a Chinese artist who lives and works in Venice. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Fine Art (Painting) at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts, and in March 2022, he obtained an MA in Painting and Artistic Anatomy at the same Academy, gra duating with honours. His poetics is based on reality and fiction, light and shadow, memory and imagination, fear and joy; all this is found in his works, in a continuous search for balance that recalls the concept of yin and yang as the base of Chinese philosophy. Qikai has been involved in numerous collective exhibitions in Venice, the most recent one in 2022 entitled 104th Young Artists’ COLLECTIVE, promoted by the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation.

The soul and human nature are two of the most prominent aspects in Qikai’s painting, which often depicts situations in which the human being is strongly connected to what happens in nature. Deaf since the age of two, silence and darkness are for him a mysterious and frightening world within which his unease increases, expanding throughout his body. Then, he searches for his inner light, a way to quiet his heart, perceive its pulsations and scan his breaths. In his paintings, this sense of disorientation and disruptive force is clearly visible; the sombre colours refer to an imaginary space of the unconscious, yet a glow always pierces the night.

In Anima che cammina, a luminescent figure tears through the blue of the darkness. It is a childhood memory of Qikai, dressed in traditional Chinese costumes, with the typical conical hat, and moving between dark animal and human presences. One of these figures, the woman seated bottom right, is an allegorical representation of Italy, a giant primitive figure whose brief profile is reminiscent of Massimo Campigli and thus symbolically testifies to the meeting between the two distant worlds, between East and West and again between my past and my present. Many aspects of Chinese life, his homeland, often return in various works. These constant references are combined and amalgamated with those of his present-day life. However, the artist aspires with his works to be able to transport the viewer into that same alienating world that is so friendly to him, prompting him to take a journey into himself through his painting.

Text by Erica Massaccesi

Qikai Guo

OLIVER HAUSSMANN

Oliver Haussmann (b. 1983, Germany) lives and works in Munich. He graduated in Communication Design in 2012 at the University of Applied Sciences in Augsburg; since 2018, he has been studying Art and Painting with Prof. Pia Fries at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. Since 2012 he has been organi sing group exhibitions and projects in temporary locations with Orangerie, an art and culture association he founded.

In his research and artistic practice, a source of inspiration is the landsca pes of Yves Tanguy - the separation of geometric elements from the background, the deep shadows that create a space that is not there, are compositional approaches that can also be found in his works - and the playful gestures and apparent light ness of Roy Mordecay’s works. Haus smann’s language oscillates between the formal and the digital, in which now an abstract environment gives way to the logic of computer games and vice versa, in a collage of de construction and reassembly motifs borrowed from the digital world and art history. “I am interested in how spaces are constructed in the digital world, how their visual logics are constructed, how visual experiences have changed in digitisation, or how new aesthetic realities can be derived from them. My style always wants to evade ambiguity. It is neither purely abstract nor purely figurative, neither two-dimensional nor spatial. It resembles the blurring of the analogue and digital worlds, a state in which we can never be fully aware of things and thus experience a free space to think, feel and act freely”.

The beautybox_3242.save series addresses the concept of beauty, often discussed in philosophy, art history and anthropology. Abstract shapes, surfaces such as rectangles, lines, gradients and shadows collide with digital fragments, three-di mensionally modelled body parts and objects reminiscent of typical beauty products. The series is realised by working with a mobile printer and an airbrush gun, extensions of the traditional paintbrush: the printer is programmed with digital structures that are interwoven with sprayed surfaces, lines and shapes, causing the digital and analogue worlds to mingle in the process. “In my paintings, you can discover different narrative frag ments. I let them guide me, and many small stories emerge during the process. But they are always open narratives; viewers can feel free to paint their own stories”.

Text by Laura Pieri

Oliver Haussmann beautybox_3242_03.save beautybox_3242_04.save Mixed media

x 32 cm

MARIE HERVÉ E ELSA MARTINEZ

Marie Hervé (b. 1996) is a visual artist and author. She lives and works between Turin and Marseille, France. Her work explores the notions of memory and ruin, conservation and cultural artefacts. Between 2018 and 2020, she worked in Malta and Athens and travelled between Greece, the south of France, Maghreb and Italy. She simultaneously built a practice of self-publishing and co-founded the collective and publishing house MYTO in 2021, developing projects related to the figure of the impostor and con temporary uses of the image.

Elsa Martinez Ambrogio (b. 1994) is a photographer and plastician living and working in Marseilles and around the Mediterranean. Elsa defines her work concerning time and its various avatars; ruins, entropy, past, future, obsolescence or memory. Her work is crossed by what she calls the latency of time, visible through processes such as restoration, preservation, conservation, and the unfinished. Since 2020 she co-own L’atelier du Palais, a riso print workshop in Arles. She is involved in several artistic collective movements, like UltraViolet_Marseille - which she co-created - a creative workshop of riso print silk screen printing that focuses on contemporary edition and experimental print.

Archives and collective memory, archaeology and ruins. Keywords in the research of the two artists Marie Hervé and Elsa Martinez, united in the duo work Sand of noises, born within the National Superior School of Pho tography in Arles and winner of the Eurazéo grant.

The first episode of the photographic tale is a journey in the city of Palermo, along the coasts of Sicily and the islands that inhabit the waters of the Mediterra nean Sea, among myths, mysteries and phantasmagorical figures. The personal visions of the two artists bind and merge into one to give rise to a complex project of images and references. This way, the viewer is transported inside an ancient story, somewhere between fiction and historical reconstruction. Traces of the past combine everyone who lives and has lived in those lands.

“A place of all projections, the ruins and objects found during our research bear witness to a form of the spleen: that of the im possibility of grasping the truth of what is lost, and of having only fragments, remains, silent witnesses.” The sand of noises is a visual narrative, which through the language of photography and the plasticity of certain elements, creates fantastic new memories in perfect balance between historicity and invention.

Text by Erica Massaccesi

Marie Hervé and Elsa Martinez Sand of Noises series

Satin paper

x 60 cm

DANAE HOFFMANN

Danae Hoffmann (b. 1994) is a German artist who lives and works in Neustadt an der Weinstraße. Danae studied Fine Art at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe and completed an Erasmus exchange semester at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux -Arts de Paris. Hoffmann participated in various shows, two of her latest ones in 2022: Frühstück mit Faun at K101 Köln and How many X ? at Kunstraum Galerie Rastatt; she also obtained the NEUSTART KULTUR scholarship the same year.

Danae creates space drawings that she then combines into abstract com positions - using objects like metal, foam, and cloth. The fabric is a barrier between the artist and the other within her space. She also employs filigree iron steel, which she utilises to create three-dimensional lines in space.

Sensual encounters serve as the inspi ration for her work, which she records as a concept on paper - it is from these drawings that Danae creates collaged abstractions. During manufacturing, the idea takes on a more distinct form - as the artwork is completed, the idea solidifies: the sketch leads to the sculpture and vice versa.

The artworks presented at the Fair are entitled Catcher and Placeholder. Catcher is a large suspended sculpture made with a soft filling material and butter yellow fabric that evokes a chain. Placeholder, in turn, are two wall sculptures of hashtags made with charcoal black fabric on cardboard. The two artworks together spark a conversational debate - are we in control of the digital and social media world with its hashtags, posts, and shout-outs, or perhaps vice versa, and it is us that are chained to it with delicate, seemingly light, joyfully coloured, but nonetheless chains?

Text by Maria Myasnikova

Danae Hoffmann Catcher

Fabric with soft filling material 180 x 19 x24 cm 2022

SIMLA ICELI

Simla Iceli (b. 2000, Adana) is a visual artist currently living and working in Milan. She studied Painting and Visual Arts at NABA (2018-2022). She has per formed for The World Within by Patrick Tuttofuoco in Milan, 2019 and she has participated in a group exhibition at Otto Zoo, Milan on the occasion of Walk-In Studio in 2021.

Simla Iceli works mostly with sculp ture, drawing, painting and text, to examine her own personal collections of keepsakes and family archives and to further explore her cultural identity. The artist summarizes her most recent pieces with the phrase “Archive As A Womb”; returning to passed down pho tographs and relics, Iceli goes through a process of gradually peeling off layers of learnt interpretations about the world, to confront deep-rooted issues with regards to patriarchal structures within contemporary society. Through anthropological investigation of her own memories and past, Iceli opens-up her works to a wider dia lectical context in an attempt to relate to audiences sharing similar expe riences. During that process, the artist uncovers and points out troubling domestic power-structures, disguised as harmless, ordinary childhood recollections. Interested in sparking purposeful conversation around the subject of tools of social change for gender equality, Iceli condemns and speaks of the unjust environment she finds herself in, as a young woman.

On the occasion of the third edition of ReA! Art Fair, Iceli presents a series of works, created between 2020 and 2022, consisting of small-scale maquette sculptures, a paper figurine depicting a girl riding a bear and an oil and water color painting. With these works, Iceli breaks down traditional, religious and everyday rituals by isolating elements of perplexing narratives, de-contextualising familiar iconography so that singula rities may be closely observed and studied. The fragmented, detached bits of imagery are then painted, drawn or represented sculpturally and arranged in diverse spatial compositions to reveal newfound outlook on obsolete tales and ultimately deny forced conformity.

Text by Paola Shiamtani

TERESITA JIMÉNEZ

Teresita Jimenez (b. Chile, 1992) is an artist and art educator based in London. In 2022 she obtained an MA in Fine Art Printmaking from Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London and previously graduated in Aesthetics and Philosophy and obtai ned a BA in Visual Arts from Ponificia Universidad Catolica in Chile. Teresita has held exhibitions in her native country, Argentina and the UK. In 2018 she carried out a residency at Proyecto ACE, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and this experience culminated in her first solo exhibition, Divina Presencia, in 2019 - when she was selected for the Young Art Prize of the Municipality of Santiago de Chile - she received the first honourable mention in the printmaking sector. In 2018, she worked as an art educator and therapist at the Lincoln International Academy, Santiago, Chile.

Through photography, printmaking and the use of the colour gold, my works speak of the interconnection between man and nature. As climate change becomes more of a threat to our existence than ever, my artwork is based on the need for a spiritual connection with nature. My work stems from walks and wanderings. Each becomes a journey of exploration, where moments of conscious contemplation are sought. Priority is given to connecting with found natural elements, such as stones, leaves, shells and feathers, which often go unnoticed. The process involves moments of photographic recording and collection of materials, treasures and memories of those experiences, which are then used in the construction and elaboration of the work.

In my most recent works, I have investigated the territories sacred to the Incas in Chile, emphasising the relationship between walking and pilgrimage, nature and spirituality. Through the various projects, I try to share the collected documents and elements, giving them their due value and releasing them so that others can get in touch with nature. At the same time, I try to reflect on the practice of walking as a bodily activity that becomes a meditation in movement.

Text by Laura Pieri

Teresita Jiménez

The Living Tree 3 (1/3)

Screenprint, Somerset paper 112 x 77 cm

YUN KIM

Yun Kim (b. South Korea, 1992) is a visual artist living and working in London. In 2016 she completed a BA in Theatre Design at Nottingham Trent University, and in 2021 an MA at Central Saint Martins, University the Arts London. Since 2019 she has made and won several exhibitions and awards, including I Promise you at Apiary Stu dios and Away with words at the Candid Arts Trust in London and Helen Scott Lidgett Award.

Kim’s current artistic research analy ses the phenomenon of the alienation of individuals in contemporary society; we no longer speak of people but of anonymous entities that find themsel ves in a highly passive position despite being aware of and acknowledging their existence and singularity at the same time. From territorial empires, we have moved on to new economic realms, and one of the consequences of globalisation is a tendency towards cultural flattening and self-expression. “The study of individuals and communities from a colonialist perspective has been ex tended to the new imperialist context in the market-oriented economy that now consti tutes the totality [...] Recently, in particular, I have been observing the fact that even art loses its independence as it becomes embedded in the system and I explore the phenomenon of art objects cleverly acquiring their values as products while successfully maintaining the ostentation of not being produced. Through this lens, I explore the colonisation of art objects within an artistic context and study the possibility of de-colonial artistic expression in a state of chaos between the ambiguous bounda ries of reality and surreality or commodities and art objects”.

Productive Imperfection is part of the artist’s series of works with the egg as their protagonist object. A profoundly symbolic element, it takes on a political significance in these works: if, on the one hand, it is linked to nature, at the same time, it is an actual consumer product, like any other in the dynamics of capi talism. According to Kim, in the logic of capital, the increase in productivity for profit usually harms the individual in the name of a greater good. Specifically, in this work, the artist seeks to reveal and pay attention to how over time, the dy namics of capitalism have shifted from labour and products to relationships and culture and how art is still able to rebel against this mechanism. “The objects applied to the work are deliberately completed in an incomplete form, enhancing artistic productivity” and breaking away from the dynamics of serial productivity and profit”.

Text by Laura Pieri

TARZAN KINGOFTHEJUNGLE

Tarzan Kingofthejungle (b. Winchester, 1998) lives and works in London. He is a graduate of Slade School of Fine Art (UCL), whose work spans mediums such as moving image, installation, sculpture, performance and drawing. The artist’s most recent body of work examines different camera movements and montage techniques such as the Kuleshov effect, a 19101920s idea of two shots in sequence interacting for viewers to derive and perceive conveyed meaning. Kin gofthejungle has of late participated in the Not Long But Very Good exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, London, 2021 and his work has been published in the Era Journal Issue 14: GET REAL in 2021 and Issue 15: Up and Away in 2022.

Interested in the function of fiction in cinematography, the artist creates ambiguous scenarios through which we may consider the role of pop or religious iconography in narrating one’s personal experiences and consequently the greater nature of being. Deliberately exaggerating when making use of cartooned subjects to represent archetypes, Kingofthejungle raises existential questions through seemingly amusing devices in a rather ironic way. Playful camera angles and blow-up framing render the protagonist figures of the artist’s video works quite monumental, in many ways absurd and no longer mundane. Out-of-place elements are present in otherwise recognisable landscapes, at times acknowledging their own condition as keepsakes or memories, such as in the 2020 film ABS, in the Cold Light of Day;

where a ghost figurine reflects on its purpose and past as a mass-produced plastic toy and at the same time a repre sentation of a supernatural apparition.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Kin gofthejungle presents Dog, (2019), activa ting an encounter between the audience and a partially-visible 3D-modeled canine, standing still on what appears to be a chessboard, infinite. The soothing sound of rain and that of the author’s voice, reciting a poem, contribute to setting an otherworldly digital scene, both whimsical and abyssal. “Time - is like a currency, spent, wasted and lost. I could age a hundred years, but at what cost?” the narrator recites, while the artist considers the role of the author in a more sentimental rather than pragmatic realm.

Text by Paola Shiamtani

Tarzan Kingofthejungle

SØREN KRAG

Søren Krag (b. 1987 in Silkeborg, Den mark) is based in Bergen, Norway. He has attended The Art Academy of Jutland (Aarhus), Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology (Bangalore) and graduated with an MFA from the Art Academy in Bergen in 2019. Recent exhibitions include participation in Statens Høstutstilling 2020 (Oslo), ‘Into the wild’ at QB gallery (Oslo), and ‘CMYK’ at MLAG(Bergen). In 2020, Krag was awarded the Lumen price for technology: Nordic award and was the winner of the 2020 Talente-Prize in textile; in addition, his work was awarded the 2nd prize in the Valcellina Award 11th edition of the same year. His work is represented in the col lection of The Art Museum in Sogn & Fjordane(Førde).

The artist crosses different artistic disciplines to explore the electronic and digital tools that characterize our age. One technique that distinguishes Krag’s research, and allows him to probe historical art through a con temporary approach, is the practice of weaving and making tapestries. The artist makes “digital paintings,” or tapestries with abstract, often geometric representations, created through relatively simple software.

In weaving, the Danish artist seeks to use the limitations of such a method/ media as an aesthetic starting point to simultaneously explore the ideas of symmetry and ornamentation, which have permeated the history of art (and craftsmanship) and characterized dif ferent civilizations and cultural regions.

The textile piece Moiré I (264) is part of a series of tapestries created for an earlier occasion during a solo exhibition held in 2021. Moiré is a term used to refer to an optical effect that occurs when two smooth, subtle patterns are superim posed or interfere with each other and form a third pattern together. The work brings back this visual phenomenon in its ornamental version, thus proposing an element, which usually denotes the digital image, as a new decorative symbol. By integrating factors not considered important in the history of classical textile art, the artist reverses the usual conception of the impoverished and glitched image of the digital world.

Text by Milena Zanetti

KEHAN LAI

Kehan Lai (b. 1998, China) is an artist living and working in China. A graduate in Photography from Parsons School of Design in New York, she has held a se ries of group exhibitions in Australia, China, America and Germany since 2019, including in 2021 at Chuang Gallery in Shanghai, Reclaim Award in Cologne, Germany and at Sheila Johnson Design Center in New York.

The artist likes to push the boundaries of things, transform the ordinary and create new connections by playing with colours. She uses a combination of images and shapes to create natural environments: she starts by taking abstract photos taken from the reality around her and goes on to develop laser-cut outlines inspired by Chinese calligraphy. The images are printed on these irregular outlines and wooden panels, thus creating an actual set, which is nothing more than the final photograph. “I transform the everyday environment into poetic abstract photo graphs and use them as building blocks to form the scene. The abstract photographs are linked to vague impressions of curtain folds, neon lights, and lumpy car seats, which get tangled up in a feeling of Dejà Vu. The stage shown in the tableaux speaks to various interior and public spaces I have encountered. Laser-cut wooden forms form dynamic sets that allude to the detritus of lost civilisations or unnameable creatures. Printed photographs envelop the forms, giving the objects anonymity and transformation”.

Set Studi #1 is part of a project that led to creating a series of images through which the artist explores the interaction between the physical and imaginary worlds. The aim is to show how Lai imagines the astral realm, that plane of existence assumed by esoteric phi losophies and mystical religions to be accessed through astral projection, a mental and extracorporeal dimension that differs from the physical world. Using an iPhone camera with inverted colour settings and live mode - as an expedient to transform the physical world into lyrical abstractions - an archive of abstract images was collected and used as raw materials to construct the scenes. The shapes and spaces thus created form entities representing the ‘spirit’ that is said to flow in the astral world. The resulting photographs become a series of constructed scenes depicting different areas of that world.

Text by Laura Pieri

DULCE LAMARCA

Dulce Lamarca (b. 1992, Buenos Aires) is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been exhibited in Argentina, United States, New Zealand, China, Panamá, and México. Her experience working at a hospice with terminally-ill patients and her background as a cellist deeply informs her work and her interest in using time as a material. The collaborative nature of her practice has led her to work with musicians, actors, poets and improvisational comedians. Dulce is currently working on a 16 mm film shot in Uruguay in January 2022. She recently reviewed the footage for the first time with a live audience during her online performance titled Can you here me? hosted by Blue Oyster Art Project Space, Dunedin, New Zealand.

Dulce Lamarca is interested in gene rating intimate scenarios where the audience becomes greatly involved, at times altering the work itself through their spontaneous reactions, inter pretations and input. The artist works with mediums such as performance and video, reflecting on the absurd and bizarre aspects of everyday life and socio-cultural interactions.

Can you here me? is an online video per formance during which Lamarca directly connects with her audience from a distance by sharing her desktop screen from her New York studio. A recording of the performance is displayed at the third edition of ReA! Art Fair. This distance performance has so far been activated twice: at Proyecto Casa Intervenida in Buenos Aires and at Blue Oyster Art Project Space in Dunedin, New Zealand. From afar, the artist informally provides the audience with various visual, sonic and textual stimuli from her personal ever-expanding archive, improvising as she goes, bouncing off of their recep tion and perception of the material. The viewers may not be aware of the artist’s direct involvement initially, yet as they begin to engage with the piece, Lamarca’s presence becomes evident. The artist is constantly allowing the viewers to access her in-progress research and yet to be published body of work.

Text by Paola Shiamtani

Dulce Lamarca

here me?

CRISTINA LAVOSI

Cristina Lavosi (b. Italy, 1993) is an Italian visual artist currently based in The Netherlands, where, in 2020, she completed her Master’s degree at the Royal Academy of Art, winning the ‘Master Department Award’. Alongside her artistic practice, she is co-founder of First Cut, an artist-run initiative that curates screenings of experimental video art. Her films have been screened at international festivals, such as ‘Kinemastik’ in Malta and ‘Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen’.

Lavosi’s artistic practice encompasses digital and analogue film, archival footage, sound, photography, and prints. Her work takes shape through time-based media and audio-visual installations. The artist’s practice investigates power structures and consequentially challenges institu tions of violence. Within these frames of reference, her research looks at how visual and verbal language is constructed and performed, predo minantly by Western political and cultural institutions, to shape domi nant narratives, impose archetypes of normative existence, and criminalise precarious groups across class lines, race, and gender. Lavosi’s focus on dismantling hegemonic narratives is committed and aimed at a transforma tive approach to storytelling. Her work strives to find ways to retell historical records and create new storylines by drawing from the very existence of those who, under the systems of race, class, and gender disparities, are deemed unfitting with what it is to be “human”. To overcome human-centred narratives, her work also aims to in clude a more-than-human agency in discourses of power relations.

Lavosi presents at ReA Art Fair the video installation ”The was—is—ever—shall—be of cosmic reproductivity” as part of ongoing research on pastoralism and the political agency of non-human animals. The work follows the artist’s research on the strikes that shepherds from the Italian island of Sardinia carried out in 2019 to protest against the low prices paid by cheese factories for their milk. The short Super 8 analogue video depicts the birth of a lamb on the island; this brief, un scripted scene is shown alongside prints of stills taken from online footage of the shepherds’ protests and a projection of milk drops poured and dried over film slides. All these “fragments” so-called by the artist are mingled and harmoniously blended, resulting in a composition aimed at suggesting reflections on the topics of non-human animals’ production and reproduction labour, placing them within the framework of agro-pastoral struggles against capitalist accumulation.

Text by Vittoria Martinotti

LILI LEE

Lili Lee (b. 1993) is a South Korean artist who lives and works in Daegu. In 2019 she obtained a BA in Fine Art from Dankook University. She has been inspired by East Asian painting for the last sixteen years; she enjoys the sha dows and effects of paint on rice paper that it offers. Lili has participated in exhibitions in Toronto, Taiwan, France, and Korea. She views her practice as a kind of meditation and self-healing that inspires creativity and awakens inner consciousness.

Lee has recently been influenced by the concept of Shaman – an ancient Korean religion associated with Korean Folk Culture. She assumes the role of a Shaman, a mental healer who fosters self-reflection and links people to their surroundings. The artist incorporates the ornate craftwork of Shaman ritual instruments to create a unique spiri tual lexicon, using distinctive symbols found in religious talismans to develop a spiritual realm and link with East Asian art.

With an Eastern viewpoint, she expands the meaning of art and emphasises the talismanic qualities within her artworks, as talismans are believed to ward off harm and cure the psyche. Shamans are a special kind of healer – they possess unique abilities to work with their ancestry to benefit others. In Korea, Shamans’ traditional healing techniques include acting as a liaison between the living and the dead so that their needs might be satisfied. Shamanism is founded on the understanding that communal interaction is the essence of traditional Korean culture.

Based on this understanding of Korean folklore, it instantly becomes a magical existence and serves as a means of hope and consolation for the community. Additionally, Lee is drawn to depictions of the talisman – a shamanic instrument used for protection against bad luck and aid in interpersonal relationships. Lili’s abstract artworks themselves become talismans made of lines and dots. She separates the line and form-based original components of a talisman, reassembles them, and then adds orna mental shapes and colours inspired by the Shaman’s tools.

The ritual of filling the surface reminds her of the community’s history, purpose, and significance. Consequently, the concept and the execution become one. “This conscious alteration reminds me of the meaning of a charm in a community based on the images of a talisman, and the work itself can represent a shaman to help people heal, or it can represent an artist as a shaman.”

Text by Maria Myasnikova

Lili Lee

My Red Lucky Talisman 2 Powder Paint on Rice Paper (Hanji) 130 x 70 cm 2022

DAVIDE LHAMID

Davide Lhamid (b. 1997) is an Italian-born, London-based documentary photo grapher and visual artist. After comple ting his sociological and anthropological studies, he approached photography as he sought an alternative language to effectively communicate his tho rough research, which was critical to his practice. Accordingly, in the early years of his career, he questioned himself on which place he could fill within the art of photography and which one he occupied in the world as a social actor. Lhamid, the son of mi grant parents, and in response to his personal and academic background, has developed a particular interest in social inequalities and institutional forms of racism within migration processes. Aiming to shed light on the functioning of social phenomena by deconstructing and questioning forms of shared understanding, Lhamid links his visual research to the linguistic and spatial dimensions of social systems. His practice is informed by research-based critical thinking, drawing from a diverse theoretical framework that helped him develop his distinctive way of picturing social issues. The artist aims to produce a multi-layered visual narrative that creates interrelations between its representation and its social and cul tural premise. To accomplish such a purpose, he works with mixed media, analogue and digital photography, textual and archival materials, photo collage and installations.

For the Fair, Lhamid presents “Il linguaggio della criminalizzazione” and “Oltre lo Stigma” part of the series Stigmata. The works sit at the intersection of research and art as a challenge to the myth of the overrepresentation of migrants within the Italian prison population and their so-called “natural” proclivity to crime. By deconstructing deceptive statistics, Stigmata shines a light on the complex cultural and social factors which lead to criminality by offering an alternative to narratives rooted in racism and fear. “Il linguaggio della criminalizzazione” is a visual representation of the physical and se mantic space occupied by the horrible history around which the conception of the criminal other is constructed. With his piece, Lhamid unpacks how instrumental language can be in framing migration and how institutional violence can be carried on through a specific lingo.

“Oltre lo Stigma” is the final chapter with which Lhamid ends this journey, an at tempt to tear down the intrinsic cultural and bureaucratic hatred persisting in our society by showing the true colours of structural violence’s victims.

Text by Vittoria Martinotti

Davide Lhamid

Oltre lo Stigma

Mixed technique, analogue picture, photo collage

Digital inkjet print 2021

MOCHU LI

Mochu Li, born in 1997, is a Chinese artist working in new media. She stu died at Dalian Polytechnic University, receiving a 1st level degree in Art and Technology. She is currently studying at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, taking a course in Net Art.

The human species has always had a close relationship with technology; there has always been a co-partnership between the two, but only in recent decades have we become aware of the power with which it can impose its dominating codes and simultaneously give us the ability to overcome the li mitations of those dominating codes. The artist has always been trying to investigate through different media the computer content that constitutes the totality of the Internet network to emphasise its fallible elements and, at the same time, the potential derived from its imperfection. Mochu mines them for data and information deemed meaningless or erroneous to explore their close relationship with the outside world.

The three-channel video work Come ottenere la giusta visione (How to Obtain the Right Vision) aims to restore a more possibilistic version of the technolo gical age and its developments in the society of the future. Starting from the artist’s desire to explore and colonise Mars as another possible world for humanity, Li imagines a future that can overcome the anthropological and social limits of terrestrial life in which aspects considered defective pass overturn and turn into potential tools for development.

The Chinese artist proposes an ima ginary version of a series of scenes of future life on the Red Planet. A world coloured only by subtle shades of brown, a colour that is generally very difficult for normal human eyes to distinguish but is an advantage for colour-blind people. Building on this computer data, the work questions the normal visual functions that humans have adapted to life on Earth and, at the same time, produces a hypothesis: could the defect be a functional evolution to adjust to the future of an uncertain environment and readjust to changing living conditions?

Text by Milena Zanetti

Mochu Li

ottenere la visione giusta

channel video

Lisha Liang is a Chinese artist (b. 1994) living and working in Florence. Her artistic path began at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, where she received her BA; she then moved to Florence, where she is currently attending the Academy of Fine Arts. In the past five years, she has participated in various shows in China and Italy.

Liang’s practice focuses on social issues through a cross-disciplinary approach that blends performance, sculpture, interactive and active installations, photography, and video. Through her work, the artist shines a light on the biases and flaws of today’s complex society: the pres sures faced by the public to conform to unattainable standards and the impossibility of a solid definition of an individual’s identity within their community. Liang has recently shifted her focus on gender issues and the constant perpetuation of gender-ba sed violence, as these matters have increasingly worried the artist and urged her to become aware and active in the feminist battleground by extending and exploring in her artistic research the topics of sex education and domestic violence. Liang believes contemporary art mirrors society’s queries: what can we do to make tomorrow a better day? According to the artist, we can start by showing to people and making them aware of the problems affecting our collective experiences.

These concepts are portrayed in “Disso luzione dell’identità” presented at the Fair. Following the Freudian guidelines of the definition of identity, the work aims to show the process of self-construction and what goes through the process of exchange with otherness. However, in this specific case, the subject under investigation is the installation itself, which, thanks to an AI device, moves and com municates differently according to the audience’s behaviour.

As in many of Liang’s works, the power of “Dissoluzione dell’identità” lies in the construction of symbols: the pipes represent the human body deprived of all subjective characteristics, and plastic leaves and stones piled on the ground refer to an artificial construct within a contrived social environment, and finally the life trajectory, set by others for each individual, is reflected in the model placed on the self-driving car. When we look at the installation for the first time, we immediately spot its differences compared to us - living creatures. Howe ver, we soon realise that the machine, too, looks at us with its “digital” eyes and thinks the same thing about us: the artwork, therefore, becomes a reflection of ourselves.

Text by Vittoria Martinotti

Lisha Liang Dissoluzione dell’identità Interactive installation Tubes, sand, iron frame, fake plants, electrical engine 2021

JULIA LIGEZA

Julia Ligeza (B. 2000, Poland) is a multi disciplinary artist who lives and works in London. Graduating from Kingston School of Art in 2022, as co-founder of the curatorial and art collective OUB, she has curated, organised, and shown her works in galleries and exhibition spaces in London, including COMING to OUR SENSES in Kate Ho studio.

The artist's research explores the rela tionship between image, touch and the tension between the familiar and the strange. She uses different mediums, such as sculpture, installation, moving images and digital art. Julia is of Polish origin; she has lived in the UK from a young age, and the intercultural aspect that characterises her personality has led her to use art as a bridge between language and culture, navigating a spectrum of confused identities.

"My practice exists as an attempt to embody intangible moments of clarity. I navigate the intimacy between image and space, using collage techniques within moving images, text, photography and installation. Often self-reflective, I construct narratives of ab stract and Augmented Identity through the experience of touch – I aim to reconnect with closeness and attachment to increasingly modern lifestyles. The recurring 3D printed objects and entities within my work act as a dialectic between doing and showing, the virtual and the real, representing a playful examination of how things exist in the world and how we look at them".

The current cultural context, deeply rooted in technology and biopolitics, is the source of inspiration and the pro tagonist narration of the artist's works. The Digital Erosion series explores how theories of mathematical probability are related to geographical processes, and the series of 3D sculptures created are the material result of how this organic randomness can be replicated with te chnologies. 3D prints are manifested as digital grains of sand, randomly generated and eroded through a manual code, each truly unique. Once these forms were created, Ligeza's research went further, observing how these objects could be activated and incorporated into our perception if used in a practical and performative way. From here, the work finds further development with the creation of moving images, and the result is - Tactile Automation, a video that shows these objects turning into tools to extend the capabilities of the body, creating a shared vitality between the animate and the inanimate. Interactivity is a critical component of this work; the public is invited to confront the tactile sculptures directly.

Text by Laura Pieri

Julia

MARIA LISSONI

Maria Lissoni (b. 1999) is an Italian artist living and working in London, where they graduated in Design for Art Direction at London College of Communication in 2021. Their multidisciplinary practice explores the politics of the archive and the deconstruction of iconography and archetypes through writing, indepen dent publishing, experimental photo graphic processes, and filmmaking. Their work has been showcased at the Barbican Centre (London, 2020), Flat Time House (London, 2020) and Biblioteka (Kijv/London, 2022).

Maria Lissoni’s work investigates Trans-formative practices1 , celebrating the intersection of ritual performances, funerary traditions, and language migration with the support of archive material. Archives are a recurring presence in their enquiry, acting as a tool for questioning institutionalised systems of power. Deconstructing and rearranging existing material is used as a counter-hegemonic cultural practice2, presenting new perspectives and alternative narratives.

By juxtaposing and layering photo graphic and print processes as well as text, their work threads unorthodox connections between documents and histories: the relationship between Catholic martyrs and the representa tion of violence in American horror cinema; the historical and spiritual links between Brazilian shamans and the androgynous Amazon warriors of Greek mythology; rediscovering the

connection between Egyptian pharaohs and Joan of Arc. Publishing is another extension of their practice, utilising the subversive qualities of print as an investi gative instrument to explore the politics of the body and language.

Drawing from sacred and profane ico nography, their latest work is a series of deconstructed Polaroid pictures. Treated like forgotten documents, found relics, the images embody frailty and, simultaneously, project strength. The in trinsic power of these corrupted portraits lies in the process of deconstruction and decay of the film, bringing life to spiritual and sometimes unrecognisable subjects and their bodies. Through vo luntary manipulation and “antagonism”, the creation process suggests a subversive action against institutionalised canons and social conventions, presenting new mythologies, cultural hybrids, hermaphro dites, and proto-humans.

Text by Erica Massaccesi

1 Maria Lissoni’s

2bell hooks (1991)

Race,

Maria

PIETRO LO CASTO

Pietro Lo Casto (b. 1986, Italy) is a visual artist based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Pietro performs intersectional rese arch through his artworks, exploring how human and more-than-human worlds are mutually entangled. He is pursuing an MFA in Visual Arts at Chiang Mai University with a full scho larship. Previously Lo Casto studied Photography at the Pathshala Insti tute in Bangladesh. Recently, he has participated in the Khontemporary Artist Residency (Khon Kaen, Thailand, 2022). He is also a member of the AMOR MUNDI Multispecies Ecological Worldmaking Lab.

In recent years, issues related to the theme of the Anthropocene have been central to numerous artistic pro ductions. Climate change, pollution, and land exploitation are all real crises, with every human aware of them. However, in the research of Pietro Lo Casto, this theme is addressed in a visceral and often even intimate way. The artist, who has lived for some time in the city of Chiang Mai in Thailand, witnessed firsthand the drifts of the capitalist system. Through his worksphotographs, sculptures and videos –Lo Casto opens a window on a world that, in the West, seems to be so far away. A complex country, full of stories, myths, legends and magic. Seven hundred twenty years ago, the first King who founded the city of Chiang Mai chose the waters of the Mae Kha canal as Guardians of the city.

The inhabitants of the neighbouring villa ges believed that spirits lived inside the embankment. Traditionally in northern Thailand, rivers are inhabited by many ghosts and spirits - that water sustains the peoples of those lands and is also the guardian of other forms of life, for which one must have reverence and care. Today, after the unregulated growth of urbanisation, the urban canals have suffered heavy pollution, becoming toxic sites. As a result, the city and its inhabi tants turned their backs on its guardians.

The Water Guardians series explores the beliefs associated with aquatic ecosystems, giving birth to those imper ceptible spirits that populate the waters around Chiang Mai. In this way, the artist also emphasises the invisibility of the An thropocene: “a system which is supported and enabled by the unseen”. The sculptures and photographs he created are placed in an anthropized, internal environment, where every form of nature no longer exists because man has erased it. But they are there, clearly visible in front of the viewer’s eyes and are ready to claim their place again.

Text by Erica Massaccesi

Pietro Lo Casto Water Guardians

Photographs; glazed ceramics

Variable dimensions 2021 – ongoing

VALENTINA LUPI

Valentina Lupi (b. 1997) is an Italian artist based in Arezzo. In 2020 she obtained her BA in Painting from ABABO, Bo logna, where she studied with Luca Bertolo and Luca Caccioni. She has participated in the first episode Il Mio Cuore è Vuoto Come Uno Specchio at Palazzo Biscari (Manifesta 12, Catania), as Gian Maria Tosatti’s assistant. In 2021 she was a finalist for the Ducato Prize, Academy Art Prize section, and she became Gian Maria Tosatti’s studio assistant in Naples. Her works have been exhibited in various exhibitions throughout Italy and abroad, such as Vuoto Apparente (Teatro Litta, Milano) and A Tiny Bit of Fire (Fitzrovia Gallery, Londra).

Valentina Lupi’s paintings are small windows onto a silent, sometimes melancholic world, where the details, in their lack of completeness, catch the eye. Through her light and delicate brushstrokes, the artist gives shape to a game in which the microscopic fragments of any subject become the protagonists. Her practice is based on investigating the relationship between vision and image, experimenting with different ways the human eye comes into contact with the figures standing out in front of them. In choosing her subjects, Lupi often uses video stills collected from the Internet, which build her visual archive. The Internet is a place of continuous research, made up of re sults that are immediate and obsolete at the same time; it is like an extensive archive that is made up of moments that become contemporary ruins.

They are moments in the history of others, an ever-expanding contemporary collective place. The common thread in the artist’s work is the search for existing images to reveal their semantic and aesthetic potential through the painting medium. In Am I Alone? the same process can be seen. A cold, snowy, distant en vironment where a bear wanders lonely among some snow-covered houses. And while the use of snow as a poetic element relates to her latest pictorial research, the artist poses a further question: what are the boundaries between the wild animal and the human environment?

Text by Erica Massaccesi

Valentina Lupi

I alone?

on canvas

MARIA MAANESKIOLD

Maria Maaneskiold (b.1994) Is a Norwe gian artist based in Oslo. She graduated in art direction in Oslo and worked mainly in the fields of illustration and painting; recently, she has also started experimenting with performance, sculpture and installation. The artist has designed several posters, animations, fabric, and clothing in her activities.

Maneeskiold has participated in nume rous group exhibitions in Oslo, where she also had a solo show in 2021. That same year she participated in the group show ‘Mirror mirror’ Gallery in Hong Kong.

lot of my work is based on complex feelings around female self-image, identity and sexuality – something I feel like there could be a more positive conversation around.” Indeed, her practice reinterprets life experiences from both the personal and public sphere, creating new ima gery that combines the seriousness of the themes with a touch of humour. For instance, the artist also talks about her fascination with cartoons during her childhood and how they led her to imagine different worlds from the real ones.

Maaneskiold brings two notable and interrelated works to the Fair: ‘ out of my skin, and crawling back in’ ‘Moulting’. The former consists of a mixed-media drawing on paper, while the latter is a 3D fabric silhouette about 2m long. The subject is the shell of a human body in both works. Almost nothing remains of the person they might have been, and everything that constituted them physically or spiritually has disappeared.

SIMONE MARCONI

Simone Marconi (b. 1996) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Bristol. He relocated to the UK in 2018 and enrolled in UWE’s BA in Art & Writing programme in 2021.

Through an urban-driven process, Marconi first began to examine colours and typography: this has laid the groundwork for the studio method he employs today: he starts with spray paint to create an underlayer for the painting and then refines and finishes it with oil bars and acrylic paint. Simone frequently works on the back side of the canvas, creating order out of disorder and bringing the usually hidden and undesirable blemishes to the fore – he doesn’t aim for flawless-looking outcomes. In his writings, the artist delves into the pervasive surveillance, recording, and analysis that people living in the West experience. He is fascinated by how people perceive the concepts of right and wrong, boundaries, and taboos. In addition to examining perception, physical and mental repression, and limits, his art explores the con temporary western reality of being continually recorded and evaluated. Simone also incorporates aspects of city life into his artworks, exploring how humanity gradually transforms into a commodity. The aggressive, alienating, and impulsive nature of the artist’s paintings and urban inter ventions give the impression that he is being pressured to produce them by an unperceived presence, perhaps an inner conflict that is patrolling and scrutinising his work.

The artwork presented at the Fair is a triptych entitled Reverso 1 to 3 (Clan destine Layers). We instantly notice the colour contrast: colourful splashes of carmine red, apricot yellow and Helvetia blue confined and surrounded by the black lines resembling an urban fence. Here, this fence represents an element of control, and the question that comes to my mind is whether we are the colourful splashes of paint trying to break free, co existing within the fence, accepting the rules of the game, or are we ourselves the fence? The “hidden” becomes the piece’s main focus, representing everything we hide from others: layers of fear and anxiety are coming through the surface and trespassing the tryptic. Clandestine emotions invade the painting and disrupt the defensive fences, like a memory that is faded by the time that dissol ves behind your back as you look at the sea.

Text by Maria Myasnikova

Simone Marconi

Reverso 1 to 3 (Clandestine Layers)

and

pastels on canvas

ANDREJA KRSTIC

Andreja Krstic (b. 1993), who goes by the artist name Chenipe, is a Serbian artist who lives and works in Belgrade. His work encompasses a variety of creative media, including digital art, murals, canvases, and sculptures. An dreja developed an interest in graffiti at the age of thirteen; as an adult, he gradually evolved into working with abstract forms through studying and research. By working with abstract compositions, he feels free to con centrate on the aesthetic value of the works, providing each spectator with the chance to have a unique response to his artworks. Krstic graduated with a Master’s Degree in 2017 from the University of Applied Arts’ Wall Painting Programme in Belgrade, and that same year, he joined the Fine Artists Association and the Applied Artist and Designers Association of Serbia. His artworks may be found in Serbian and foreign private collections and Indonesian, European, and Balkan public spaces.

Since Chenipe started painting graffiti, and as his work evolved, his significant objective has been to introduce con temporary visual art to urban settings. He utilises abstract composition to create something surreal and out of the ordinary to inspire the audience to let their imagination run wild. The artist is enthusiastic about how urban environments are represented in public art – he takes inspiration from street art and translates it into interior pieces like paintings, sculptures, and digital prints. Andreja’s primary focus is on the finished product’s aesthetic value and visual impact - his work comprises harmonious compositions of dynamic shapes and varied colour schemes with low and high contrast.

He works mainly with spray paint and acrylic, which links his outdoor and inside creations. Krstic enjoys pushing himself to complete new visual challenges with attention to detail and high-calibre pro duction.

The sky has lately taken centre stage in his works; in fact, the wall intervention with sculptural elements presented at the Fair, entitled Sunset Above Confluence, has been inspired by the sky – its colours and subtle changes. As Chenipe was creating a digital sketch for the site-spe cific piece, he found himself fascinated by seeing how the colours of the sky changed with the subtle shifts of light and how the clouds formed throughout the day. The artist used digital appli cations to process sky images before experimenting with forms and abstract composition. The vibrant colours of Sunset Above Confluence entice the observer into the artwork, while painted MDF layers hi ghlight the piece’s dynamism. As Claude Monet put it: For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment, but the surroun ding atmosphere brings it to life - the light and the air, which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.

Text by Maria Myasnikova

Andreja Krstic (Chenipe)

ALICE MAZZEI

Alice Mazzei (b. 1998) is an Italian artist living and working in Bologna, where she obtained a BA in Painting and an MA in Art Communication and Didactics from the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts. Her painting attempts to pursue the polyvalent metaphor of drapery, in constant suspension between movement and statics.

“When you paint or carve drapery, you are painting or carving forms which, for all practical purposes, are non-representational - the kind of unconditioned forms on which artists even in the most naturalistic tradition like to let themselves go”. (Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954)

Heavy or light, tenuous or blinding, bodily or spectral, drapery in Mazzei’s works is a mysterious symbol that draws the viewer’s attention to something powerful and unknown. In Inattesa, a white drape is the only visible form, which, ethereally, stands out against a nocturnal background. Every geographical reference is lost in the darkness of the night, while that glow becomes witness to those Pathosformel (Warbung A.) that pulsate in the images. Is anyone hiding under that veil? Or maybe it’s just a dream, as in the painting L’altra parte, where a yellow drape seems to fly over a rocky landscape. The colour palette of the background is always gloomy, with references to the dreaminess of the night, but the drapery stands out with its light suspended in the air.

The artist aims to play with the ambiguity of the image, opening questions to which she deliberately does not give answers and leaving the viewer free to interpret the artwork.

As Aldous Huxley puts it: “the draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in a particularly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being.”

Text by Erica Massaccesi

Alice Mazzei Inattesa

on wood

x 30 cm

GIONA MESSINA

Giona Messina (b. 1993) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Padova. He spent his formative years in Catania, where in 2017, he obtained a BA in Fine Art from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Catania. Messina has taken part in various exhibitions, with his latest one in 2021 entitled Finalisti Premio Nocivelli at the Chiesa della Disciplina in Verolanuova.

Giona’s artistic research is fuelled by his experiences and interactions with the world and himself. Being an emerging artist, the luggage he brings with him while he navigates the world is relatively small, and although he encounters many people on his jour ney whose stories and experiences inspire him, the most productive con currence, like for many artists, is with himself. During his time in Sicily, he realised that whenever he completes an artwork, he can’t shake the feeling of it not being enough, and this feeling acts as the driving force for his new projects. Messina’s artworks are an assemblage of memories, notes and experiences that he carefully docu ments through oil painting, drawing and writing: I get lost, find myself, some times things don’t suit me, other times I’m satisfied. The key to his artistic practice is that he looks inside himself, via others, and this introspection, analysis and melancholy then takes the form of Art. Instead of gathering dates, locations, or curators’ names, he likes playing in his universe, whose laws he still does not fully understand – and that is what makes it thrilling.

Through repetition, Giona transforms places, things, notes, and images into metaphors for emotional states; he looks for timeframes and locations that aren’t necessarily connected to the here and now but rather vanish between recollection and fantasy, between an uncertain past and a likely future. Space and time are portrayed in his work without historical context, hierarchies, simultaneity, co-presence, or total overlap. Through his artworks, he attempts to obtain a perspective on a unique and private, yet shared, narrative where the actual protagonists are not visible. It is an attempt to follow a story by being indirect, adding or removing diachronic aspects, changing the chronological order, making it sombre, removing the cause-and-effect link, and changing the location and date of the occurred experience.

Text by Maria Myasnikova

Giona Messina Abitudini Installation

Variable dimensions 2022

FRANCESCA MIOTTI

Francesca Miotti was born in 1996 in Padua; she now lives and works between London and Udine. She studied between 2017 and 2020 at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London, graduating with a BA (Hons) in Textile Design. Last year she participated in group exhibitions at the Museu Arte Popular in Lisbon (Portugal), Fabbrica Della Ruota in Biella (Italy), and CICA Museum in Gyeonggi-do (South Korea).

The artist has always been interested in weaving, first concerning the world of fashion and design, now toward more experimental and sculptural forms to produce objects that do not have a functionality, therefore, disso ciating from the traditional concept of textiles. Miotti uses the loom as the primary medium for the production of her pieces, through which she can recreate a dialogue between different materials and play with overlapping shapes. By imprinting simple and repetitive gestures on the canvases obtained on the loom, the artist creates a visual composition that allows the audience to observe and interact with the various dimensions that the different textiles show by relating to one another.

In her sculptures, we find visual sensa tions connected to touch and sight - to the perception of the body concerning matter. It is the gesture that is co-pro tagonist along with the materials used: looking at the concept of childhood and education that passes through play as the first exploration of the envi ronment and the body, Miotti proposes some methodologies and gestures within her work.

Juxtaposing constructed textiles with the idea of play as a process of explo ration, the artist simultaneously includes the concept of construction and de struction in the elaboration phases of her installations.

Drappo Infilzato is a sculptural work that investigates the dialogue between the contrasting nature of materials through the clear visible separation of two dif ferent textile materials belonging to the same warp. This process stems from gravitational spontaneity: The cloth has been woven in one layered piece, but the installation takes its final form only through gravity once released from the frame’s tension. The combination of the structural properties of the materials aims to create a relationship with the viewer by invoking the potential for in teraction, recognizable through the eye, and creating a tactile, visual sensation.

Text by Milena Zanetti

Francesca Miotti

Drappo Infilzato

Hand-woven paper yarn, lambswool, banana fiber 32 x 28 x 23 cm 2020

LORENZO MONTINARO

Lorenzo Montinaro (b. 1997) is an Italian who lives and works between Ta ranto and Milan. Montinaro’s artistic process alternates between erasing memories and reconstructing them, giving them new personal traits and existences frequently linked to him. He graduated from Iuav in Venice with a BA in Visual Arts and an MA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome in Art Didactics and Communication. Lorenzo has been a member of the interdisciplinary group Friche since 2020; he was also an artist-in-resi dence at the Milan-based Viafarini studios from January to April 2022. He participated in the show “What the fuck is prosperity” at A plus exhibition space in 2021, organised by the Curatorial School of Venice; took part in the 2022 exhibit “Salon des refuses,” organised by Metareale at Spazio Canonica in Milan, “Visioni (s)velate,” curated by Elena Bray at Viafarini, and “E ci fa dispetto il tempo,” organised by Elena Castiglia at Sottofondo Studio in Arezzo.

The installation presented at the Fair entitled Ma Non Ti Servirà Il Ricordo is essentially a self-portrait of the artist: his name, surname and date of birth are written on the tombstone. In his poetry, the dates of birth and death often fall on the same day since birth is death in essence and a sentence of doom. Next to the tombstone, we noti ce a turntable with Gino Marinuzzi’s Val zer Campestre (Country Waltz) playing, a song that sounded when Fabrizio De André – the singer-songwriter and poet who, more than any other, has affected Montinaro’s poetry and artistic creation – was about to enter the world; he was born at home.

In this work, Lorenzo has appropriated something from someone else and made it his own – he had decided to create a memory of the person that inspires him.

This installation is arguably the most autobiographical recollection Montinaro has ever created. One might try to imitate the motion that denotes birth and new life by turning on the record player and playing this song of remembrance. All of this conflicts with the marble gravestone, a blatant sign of death that serves as a short circuit in this work, connecting the artist with the people who practically play the father’s part as the poet makes the waltz echo in celebration of new life. As a result, the populace has the power to revive memory while also reviving Lorenzo, who appears to them as already dead, and his poet father, Fabrizio De André. De André borrowed Marinuzzi’s foundation for his song “Valzer per un Amore” years later. In the lyrics, a lady is encouraged to devote herself to a guy now, rather than wait till she is elderly; De André proposed to Dori Ghezzi with this song. As the artist puts it: After some time, the music, she was born to become the helper of budding love.

Text by Maria Myasnikova

Marble tombstone, record player, wooden coffee table

dimensions

Lorenzo Montinaro Ma Non Ti Servirà Il Ricordo Installation

EMMA HELENE MORICONI

Emma Helene Moriconi (b.1997) is an Italian American interdisciplinary artist, born in Milan and raised in Berkeley, California. She currently lives and works in Milan. She received a Masters of Arts in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies in 2022 from NABA, Milan and a dual Bachelors of Arts in in World Arts and Cultures and Italian Studies in 2019 from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Mori coni has participated in group exhi bitions including; Eco-Logica at Spazio Ex-Metà, Castel Goffredo, Milan (2021), BLACKOUT curated by Ana Devic, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Marco Scotini, Carol Yinghua Lu and Liu Ding (published on Artribune, 2021) and Somewhere Along the Lines at Studioeo in Milan (2020).

Emma Helene Moriconi’s practice focuses on the relationship between micro and macro organic elements pri marily through painting and drawing, as well as sculptural assemblage, instal lation, and video. Often imperceivable by the naked eye, interdependent and social organisms like mushrooms, bacteria and molds are examined through scientific documentation, the use of lab instruments like the microscope, and archives of natural history museums. The artist observes minuscule life forms and is interested in individual entities that give shape to more complex compositions and subsequently to larger ecosystems. Moriconi considers museography and the display of natural specimens.

She draws parallels between elements of different types, integrating seemingly unrelated artifacts and materials to propose new narratives of the portabile museum as a container of ideas, pro cesses, and possibilities alla Joseph Cornell, Duchamp and Eva Hesse.

“From fungi mycelium and intestinal bacteria to mineral compositions” the artist yearns to discern the different cultural, political and ideological functions of exhibition spaces hosting botanical or paleon tological collections. Interested in the pictorial representation and science of taxonomy, Moriconi investigates the ways in which this visual language shapes our understanding of the greater natural environment.

Text by Paola Shiamtani

Emma Helene Moriconi

Federica Murittu (b. 1996, Sassari) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence in Painting and then enrolled at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. Murittu works with different media, such as photography, installation and video. In 2021, she was mentioned in “The wishlist of artists to buy in 2021” publication by Il Sole 24 ORE. In 2021 she won the second edition of the Luna Rosa photo award “LEI e LEI - LEI E’ LEI”. Murittu has also taken part in the E.N.D “Essere nella distanza” residency, GIGLIO SUMMER SCHOOL#3, in 2022. Murittu participated in group exhibitions such as; Maratona di Visione in 2020 (online), IPER interno esterno, Braeraklasse#5, festival walk-in studio at CareOf (Fabbrica del Vapore, Milano) in 2020, Anemoni 2 - Premio Pavoncella creatività al femminile in 2020, AAARGH!!, Yerevan/ London in 2019, Matteo Ricci Program: International Archi tecture Joint Workshop Exhibition, Beijing in 2018 and From Chang’ an to Rome, College Photography Invitational Exhi bition, Jinan in 2018.

Sa Sùrbile (2022) poses open-ended questions with regards to future generations, while referencing tra ditional and folk Sardinian tales. The project takes its name from a cruel spirit; a vampire-witch entering houses through keyholes and feeding on the blood of unbaptized infants. Sùrbile is one of many malevolent protagonists of stories that intrigue and interest the artist, as she researches legends of humans taking on animalistic cursed forms, considering cultural repre sentations of evil in order to propose remedies and defenses.

MURITTU

To keep the children in danger safe, mothers would leave a toothed comb by their side, for the spirit to spend the night counting teeth instead of hurting the newborns. In a rather similar way, in formed by these superstitious customs, Murittu invents contemporary protective rituals, actively involving the audience.

Blood turns into milk in Murittu’s video that is central to the project, symboli zing wasted youth and lost innocence, flowing, spilling through a wooden door. Salt on the floor - a sacrament element - takes on a protective function against negative influences and gives shape to a path of numbers, a jumping game to be activated by children and viewers. The tenth and final box is labeled paradiso, bestowing hope, catharsis.

Text by Paola Shiamtani

Federica Murittu

Sa Sùrbile multimedia project

ANNA MUTSCHLECHNER-DEAN

Anna Mutschlechner-Dean (b. 1999) is an Austrian artist living and working in Vienna. She studied Transmedia Art at the University of Applied Arts, and while pursuing her education, Mutschlechner-Dean’s work was exhibited at the annual Parallel Vienna 2021 and as part of the Blue Danube Festival 2022 in Vienna and Budapest. Her latest sculptural work was shown at Phileas in the exhibition ‘Soft Machine’ with pieces of Transmedia Art along side Jakob Lena Knebl & Ashley Hans Scheirl. Furthermore, she is featured in the MoCDA Museum of Contemporary Digital Art’s summer show 2022 and the CICA Museum Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Seoul.

Mutschlechner-Dean is concerned with external events’ influence on the human consciousness and the constant alteration linked to it. The artist dialogues with nature and questions humanity’s relationship with it. Her work constantly reflects the natural world as a fundamental point of reference. Her practice is rooted in exploring habitats and organisms with distinctive traits that are still mainly incomprehensible to humans. Mutschlechner-Dean exami nes phenomenological and existential considerations concerning the natural environment; her research involves the connection between the anthropo centric and its external context, as well as technological and scientific deve lopments that intervene and reshape human perception.

“Flow until overflow”, the work presented by Mutschlechner-Dean at the Fair, addresses how the constant use and exposure to digital media affect and change the behaviour and perception of a hybrid society. It explores the ongoing distortion of nature while simultaneously depicting its transformation through the ever-shifting human connection to the environment. The artist draws a parallel between the organic and the virtual by comparing and interrelating elements of the physical ocean to those of digital communication, as they both share a similar function: connecting people around the globe. The work explores the distortion of reality that can be created and influenced by technology while shedding light on a quest for an initial state of connection to nature. Flow until overflow questions how and when to draw boundaries, what humanity needs, and what is a mere whim. The constant overload of data and information and the perpetual overstimulation of individuals by the digital age is not only perceived but also processed. The boundaries between filtered information and reality are constantly blurred between frag ments of truth and distortions of it.

Text by Vittoria Martinotti

Anna Mutschlechner-Dean

HERMANO NORONHA

Hermano Paulo de Noronha (b. 1967) is a photographer based in Lisbon, Portugal. He is a PhD Student in Contemporary Art at Coimbra University and has a MA in Artistic Contemporary Creation from Aveiro University. Noronha usually engages in long-term projects where Hermano photographs sensitive com munities or documents subjects that are not fully visible.

As the artist puts it: “I am more interested in the symptom than in the evidence, in reaching what is under the obvious. I am in terested in the voracity of time and how the plurality of individual memories combines in the construction of collective memory. Through the identification and photographic registration of symbolic markers, I seek to build archives against forgetfulness.”

Thanks to his thorough research, in 2014, he was awarded the Grant “Estação Imagem”, where he photo graphed former soldiers of the Portu guese Colonial War. The following year he was a finalist at the International EI Awards 2015 - Encontros da Imagem; and had been selected for the CreArt 2015 European Exhibition “Me and the City” with exhibitions in Pardubice, Linz and Genoa. In 2021 he developed the series of photographs entitled “Ler e Divulgar”, exhibited at the Fair, concerning Portuguese anti-fascist resistance, by invitation of the culture department of the Municipality of Loures.

During the war, in that geographic area, more than four hundred men and wo men, most of them young and in some cases even minors, protested against the violence of the fascist system and passed through political police prisons - Aljube, Porto, Angra, Caxias, Peniche and Tarrafal. Many insurgents were deported to distant places like Timor; however, those who did not remain silent were not intimidated; they did not bend to the fascist repression. Through his photographic shots, Noronha intends to remark on the historical events of that area and prevent the values of solidarity and resistance from being forgotten so that fascism can never return there, even when hidden behind a different mask. Ler e Divulgar intends not only, in a literal translation, to “read and spread the word” of remembrance but also of an ongoing and persistent feeling of pride related to that history and the people who fought on the front lines.

Text by Lucia Pievani

Hermano Noronha (ler e divulgar): #3 – Peniche prison Digital photo printed on Synthetic matt paper 2020

DESPINA PETRIDOU

Despina Petridou (b. 1995) is a visual artist, curator and art educator, currently based in Dherynia, Ammochostos, Cyprus. Petridou has recently com pleted an MScR Collections and Curating Practices degree and an MA Fine Art degree, at The University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh College of Art) in Scotland. She has participated in various group art exhibitions in Cyprus, Scotland and abroad, and has undertaken curatorial projects in both Cyprus and Scotland. Petridou is currently involved in art education as an art teacher at Xenion High School, Paralimni, Cyprus. She has had a solo exhibition entitled CAMOUFLAGE at The O Gallery, Larnaca in 2021. Recent group exhibitions include, SEEKING ROOTS at NiMAC (Nicosia Municipal Arts Center) in 2021, curated by Ioulita Toumazi, SYNERGIC at Ovalo Galleria de Arte, Mexico City in 2019 (in colla boration with Art Number 23 Gallery, London) and MUSEUM ARTIFACTS & ART IN CONVERSATION at Kallinikeio Museum, Larnaca in 2019.

The works of Despina Petridou focus on the themes of cultural identity, memory and domesticity as well as narrate her experience of growing up and living as a woman in Cyprus. Because of the ongoing Cyprus dispute the artist’s village has become symbolic of re silience and resistance, as until 1974 the main and busiest road of Deryneia connected the Kokkinochoria area with now occupied Ammochostos.

Through material research - often mani fested in the form of contrasting organic and industrial medium compositions - Pe tridou studies her island’s natural territory, the boundless blue sea surrounding the land and her region’s fertile crimson soil.

Powder stain colors the Red Relief (Unstained) diptych, reminiscent of that red terrain Petridou metaphorically links to a sense of belonging, while tile forms - cast directly from urban sitesrecall streets familiar to the artist. “The fluid patterns dominant on the work’s surface reflect the fragility and unpredictability of the natural environment in relation to the need for structure and purpose, implied by the rigid geometry and lines that contain and ‘tame’ these appearing cracks.” De-contextuali sing allegorical elements as such, is a process that closely examines physical matter triggering mental associations to specific places or intimate experiences.

Text by Paola Shiamtani

Despina Petridou

Red Relief (Unstained) | Gypsum, metal, powder stain 75 x 30 x 2 cm

Red Relief (Unstained) || Gypsum, metal, powder stain 75 x 30 x 2 cm

ILARIA PICCIRILLO

Ilaria Piccirillo (b. 1997, Italy) lives and works in Bologna. She graduated in 2019 in Graphic Art from the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino and continued her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, obtaining an MA in Painting and Visual Arts in 2022. While earning her MA, she participated in two group exhibitions, Six rooms and Living Santo Stefano, respectively, at Casa Baldassari in the province of Ravenna and Maison Ventidue in Bologna.

The hybrid training has allowed her to experiment with different types of languages. Still, it is mainly through drawing and small works midway between sculpture and objet trouvé that the artist has found the expressive medium suitable for investigating the multiple possibilities of narration of visual language.

“In the reorganization of suggestions from personal and collective experiences, narrative plays a fundamental role: whether ancient myths or stories trivially found on the Internet, stories often represent the springboard for my artistic practice. The images are also a source of inspiration from the moment I perceive new life and possibilities for them. [From the rocking, fragmented, rigid and soft, controlled and neurotic style] the newly created narratives challenge the unambiguousness of the subject. They are waiting to be completed by the viewer’s interpretation, forcing the viewer into a slow vision in which the pre viously hidden elements appear as they go.

In “Sveglio, Vigile”, starting with discovering and finding an object, the work takes shape following a traumatic and irreversible gesture that is the key to a new figuration. The work is an exhortation to remain active and conscious concerning a state of indifference. It becomes an imposition toward oneself, a reminder. The work has the features of a gilded trophy that immediately betrays itself and reveals itself through the poverty of the materials usedpaper-mâché and plastic.”

Text by Laura Pieri

Ilaria Piccirillo

Sveglio, Vigile sculpture 10x7x16 cm 2022

PAULINA PIOR

Tell me about your artistic practice!

I’m interested in inter-pictorial and intertex tual relations, hence the photography and painting in my work. My strategy is based on association games and reinterpretations of motifs fixed in our visual culture. Characteristic, recognizable by the mass audience, I place them in context, thus breaking them from the well-established associative structures. I encourage con frontation with what our contemporaries are already well-established with, with visual culture. However, my greatest inspiration is the world: observing human behaviour in a sociological and psychological context.

What or who inspires your art?

Conversations with people inspire me. Sometimes, I reinterpret folk sayings and idioms and create a rebus, a joke, a riddle.

Can you tell me about your artistic process?

I create intuitively. I synthesise the image I see. It often happens that I catch myself sitting on the canvas and painting.

Do you have any rituals concerning your practice?

Firstly, I create a sketch on the computer to quickly convey my thoughts on a small surface, but also mainly to have complete control over the colour and design of the colour composition.

Is narrative important within your work?

The narrative is important. However, what the recipient sees in my paintings is more critical and valuable than what I wanted to convey. At exhibitions, I always like to talk about it with viewers. Contact with the recipient is essential to me.

Please, describe the artwork you will exhibit at Rea Art Fair – the aims, process, outcomes etc.

I don’t want to impose the interpretation of the work. The only thing I can reveal is that my inspiration is the Polish idiom.

What has art taught you about yourself? That the subconscious mind has a significant influence on our decisions.

Text/Interview by Laura Pieri

Paulina Pior no exit acrylic on canvas 92x65 cm

AUSTEJA PLATUKYTE

Austeja Platukyte (b. 1992) is a creative researcher working in between the disciplines of material design and science, technology, and craft. She obtained an MA in Design at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and is now studying for a PhD in Design at the same Aca demy in Vilnius, Lithuania, where she currently lives and works. Her creative solutions are systematically linked to the theme of organic matter and the topic of materials transformation into other forms, introducing new social, cultural, economic, and psychological contexts into her process. Her works have been exhibited in numerous international group shows and fairs, such as Cluster Crafts Fair (London, 2022), Rethinking Plastic (Eindhoven, 2022), No Space For Waste (Milan Design Week, 2022) and Hebei International Industrial Design Week (China, 2022).

Austeja’s works are not only objects to admire but are functional and provoke reflections. Starting from concepts and design knowledge learned during her years at the Academy, Platukyte, putting together the artist and designer in her, intends to find answers to persistent ecological problems, que stioning today’s scientific information and hypothesizing a future in which objects can be made with hybrid and natural materials.

Trash to Treasure is a piece of more exten sive research and is part of a collection of works that focus on alternative design and interior items made from local organic waste materials. The sculpture chair is made of steel and manure, coming from the horse farm near the artist’s studio, and proposes a possible return to primitive technologies to learn from nature how you can become more sustainable.

“Instead of cycling and using excrement as fertilizer, the waste was shaped into a fully functional chair sculpture, with a simple design aesthetic, to create symbiotic relationships and a healthy environment for humans and nature. This project also undermines cultural norms and preconceptions of natural waste resources, usually considered less valuable waste, but shows the transformation of repellent material into contemporary art objects.”

Text by Erica Massaccesi

Austeja Platukyte

Trash to Treasure Steel, horse manure 84 x 53 x 50 cm 2022

MARÍA-ELENA POMBO

María-Elena Pombo was born in 1988 in Caracas, Venezuela. She is an inter disciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, working under the pseudonym Fragmentario since 2016. Her work has been exhibited at Somerset House (London), Mana Contemporary (Jersey City), A/D/O (Brooklyn), SXSW (Austin), and across the USA, Europe, and Japan. Most recently, at the 2021 London Design Biennale, her exhibition ‘La Rentrada’ won the Theme Medal.

The protagonist object of Fragmen tario’s research is avocado seeds, which for the artist are a subject of study to open different questions, not only related to its origins but also about territorial exploitation, food, new forms of colonization and geopolitics, migration, globalization and anthropocentrism. Workers har vest seeds in local restaurants, with whom the artist collaborates to open her practice to participatory dimen sions and forms of cooperation. For Maria-Elena Pombo, the relationships created around the collection of the materials are vital as they allow her to elaborate on the different historical, sociological and scientific references that revolve around the avocado fruit. The seeds are then transformed and recontextualized to propose new ima gery: they become material for dyeing textiles, making bricks, plastic, leather, glass, and even electricity and fuel for vehicles. Fragmentario explores diffe rent mediums in her practice - from sculpture to performance.

239 Ingraham Street is the address of Advanced Transit Mix, a Brooklyn concrete factory that existed between September 2020 and May 2021 and hosted Entrelazado en la Fábrica de Concreto, a public artwork created by María Elena Pombo with the support of Luis Madera, a worker at the factory. The work was based on silk and nylon fabric painted with avo cado seeds, lime, bicarbonate and iron and woven on the factory’s outer gate through a unique weaving technique. The work stems from the artist’s need to revive her childhood memories of giving friends and relatives avocados from her home tree in Venezuela, which have been replaced by a lifetime of being pro vided avocado seeds by restaurateurs and other individuals. For the Fair, the work consists of a triptych composed of avocado-worked textiles taken after the dismantling of Brocklin’s installation, a video made from footage of the work’s creation, and open source material from Google Street View in which the artwork is contextualized. The pieces, together and separately, seek to initiate conversa tions about the transformative nature of time, space and ourselves.

Text by Milena Zanetti

Maria-Elena Pombo

239 Ingraham Street: Hybrid Mode

Deadstock silk habotai and nylon dyed with avocado seeds, limes, backing soda and iron, Video, Stones, plastic bag

Variable dimension 2020 - 2022

EMMA PRICE

Emma Price (b. Ireland, 1997) trained in Fine Art and photography with new media, Munster Technological University - Cork City (2017-2021) and before that at Graphic design and Photography, Colaiste Stiofan Naoife, Cork City.

Through manual and digital image manipulation, Price produces pho tographic series dedicated to the intimate and personal desires of the communities around her. This explora tion is based on the visual and aesthetic construction of possible ideas and images of parallel universes. Whether utopian or dystopian, they reflect the complexity of other realms or dimensions in which the ability to find recognisable elements is replaced by the interpretative freedom granted by unknown factors. With a particular inspiration from the world of science fiction and fantasy of the 1990s, the visual representations staged by the artist function as memories or distant memories that might have existed in the earthly world or belong to the world of dreams. Evanescent and supernatural atmospheres in which, however, we can recognise familiar human figures: Price includes relatives and friends in her images to create a sense of collective memory in which we can find more intimate aspects of earthly social life.

Of the four photographs presented at the Fair, Contact is an abstract shot that refers to a scientific image of microcosms and other life forms such as bacteria or cells but was constructed from an everyday object. Untitled, on the other hand, seems to depict the compound eyes of an insect in which we recognise human figures. With this image, the artist puts the public under observation, which is examined by a different, unknown and distant species. The out-of-focus pho tograph of a seated person, 20/20 vision, out of touch, has been rendered through several passes of a scanner and is inten ded to play on the capabilities of visual interpretation through what we might consider an eye defect. Finally, Aos si is a shot that reinterprets Irish mythology for which fairy figures remain both folkloric and traditional.

Text by Milena Zanetti

Emma Price

20/20 vision, out of touch 29,7 x 42 cm

A4 print,on bamboo paper, scanned image of a moulded candle-wax 2022

Davide Quartucci (b. 2000) is an Italian visual artist born and raised in Senigallia, where he currently lives and works while studying in Milano, as he is attending the painting degree at Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. In 2021 he was featured in the group show “A new body of paintings” during ArtDate, while, in 2022, he showed his work in a solo online exhibition at Superstudiolo Gallery.

Quartucci describes his practice as a way to construct a zany, nonsensical world. He is interested in the human conception and idealisation of the man and the parallels between childhood experience and its consequent ageing process. The artist ironically confers a wacky, almost deranged dimension to his human-like creatures, allowing him to actualize his vision and intrigue his audience. Quartucci’s constant search for the bizarre is how the artist chooses to experience the world and alter its perception by creating material contrasts while praising the Dionysiac dimension of the flesh. Quartucci’s works are populated by older men acting like kids, playing naked in the mud, or pretending to be pirates while bathing. He is interested in the narrative elements found in fairy tales with which he moulds his bizarre settings imbued with a sense of madness and looming gruesomeness.

The artist plays with the morphological aspects of childish stories and alters their structure to make them fit with the absurd environments found in his canvases. Painting is the medium with which Quartucci feels he can best ma terialise his vision.

“L’ora del bagnetto (Bath Time)”, presented at the Fair, portrays an old codger bathed and cleaned with care by a young boy. The artist immerses us in his nonsensical world by offering an unconventional and twisted view of distinct aspects of our daily routine. By taking inspiration from folkloristic tales and collective imagination, the artist aims to blur and intertwine the often marked boundaries between childhood and old age. The an thropoid figures inhabiting Quartucci’s creations arouse feelings of discomfort, from phallic-shaped noses to their gravid-looking bellies and scrawny, bony bodies. Everything is resting on the edge of decadence and the rotting of the flesh while engaging in a constant dialogue with ideas of decay, matched with a ludicrous, ironic and demented sentiment.

Text by Vittoria Martinotti

Davide Quartucci

L’ora del bagnetto (Bath Time) Oil on canvas 2022

PANDELE RADU

Pandele Radu (b. 1993) is a visual artist from Bucharest, Romania. He gradua ted from UNArte in Arad, Bucharest, and studied Design in Cluj and Grenoble. Radu mostly works with oil, acrylic and digital painting, pho tography, sculpture and large-scale, urban murals. Radu had been invited by the Citizenit Association to create the largest mural in Arad, where the artist grew up, to promote cultural interventions in public spaces for the benefit of local communities. His works have been exhibited at the Mu seum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Recent Art, Mobius Gallery, Invitro Gallery, H’art Gallery, Suprainfinit Gallery and E T A J artist-run space in Bucharest as well as at Ancien Musée de Peinture in Grenoble.

Radu’s pieces bear traditional Eastern European influences, references to religious iconography as well as to pop and artificially intelligent worlds. Void spaces illustrated as transparent Photoshop squares and highly realistic graphic representations of human figu res are prominent, returning elements in his works. The multicolored, chrome skins of Radu’s subjects reflect the context and habitat they find themsel ves in, becoming almost translucent, existing between reality and fiction.

Recent portrait of god, 2022 is a work de picting a liquid flower form morphing into a troll meme stencil expanding over two canvases, its shadow creating an optical illusion of layers and depth on the flat surfaces. An ant climbing the thorny plant hints at a temporal shift between the two compositions, as its shadow has not reached that high up the darker rose just yet. The two frames of the diptych are connected by 3D modeled and printed abstract shapes, making further reference to the idea of fluctuating between an organic past and a cyber present.

Text by Paola Shiamtani

Pandele Radu Recent portrait of god Oil on canvas, 3D print Diptych: 150x 100 cm 26 x 17 cm 2022

LIVIA RIBICHINI

Livia Ribichini is an Italian mixed media artist and set designer based in The Netherlands. From a background in scenography, she started her career by making lighting installations and studying the interactions between the viewer and the physical space. In 2019 she attended the Minerva Aca demie in Groningen, studying Art and Technology, then majored in MADtech (Media, Art, Design and Technology) at Frank Mohr Institute.

Now the artist describes her artistic journey: “My current research reflects on the multiplicity of identities between users and avatars in the virtual and phy sical world. I experiment with sensations, perceptions, new media and technology.”

In her experimental practice, she successfully combines a variety of solutions: video, mixed-media instal lation or A/V performance. Ribichini has participated in various exhibitions in Milan, Rome, London, Berlin, Gronin gen, Amsterdam, and online in 2022 by participating in the New Art City Festival. Recently she was also part of an art residency promoted by the Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia Leo nardo da Vinci in Milan. Ribichini often teams up with other artists: in 2017, she became a founding member of the art duo Fulminate, which focused on light art and in 2020 of fffjpg, a mixed media duo based on electronics, noise and synthesisers. Her collaborations also involve art institutions as she has worked with Museum DR8888 (NL), Inter-University Centre for Dance Ber lin (DE), Live Cinema festival (IT), and Rewire Festival (NL).

The work presented at the Fair is an exceptional piece that combines the space between the real and the virtual world and the time between what can be deemed as past and future. Indeed, the artist calls it a theoretical work. ‘Kinesynthesis’ is a two-channel video installation; in the first channel, the artist portrays traditional agricultural work, like the hoeing of the earth and disse mination of the seeds. These actions are acknowledged by artificial intelligence that feeds the digital plant, slowly taking shape in the second channel, which, thanks to these caring actions, begins to grow and flourish on the second screen. Although the manual labour of agriculture has been almost forgotten, the artist shed light on ritualistic aspects that are fundamental to our life on this planet, albeit in a virtual dimension. The new particular plant feeds on numerical parameters given by novel algorithms, and through them, it rapidly develops green leaves, grows in height and gives birth to flowers and fruits. Thus the ancestral symbiosis between humanity and nature continues, in a sublimated way, in the digital world.

Text by Lucia Pievani

Livia Ribichini Kinesintesi

2 channel video 2022

STEFANO RIBOLI

Stefano Riboli (b. 1998) is an Italian artist living and working between Crema and Brescia. He is currently attending an MA in Visual Arts at the Santa Giulia Academy of Fine Arts in Brescia, where he received a ba chelor’s degree in Painting in 2021. In November 2021, he opened SPAZIO15, an artist-run space he shares with artist Valery Franzelli. He was involved in various group exhibitions, such as Kenopsia-Dialoghi aperti tra sei artisti e un palazzo at Palazzo Palazzi (Brescia, 2021) and HYBRID EDGES, New Media Art Festival (Bergamo, 2021).

Since 2021 Riboli has been pursuing his research into the congruence between the real and virtual worlds with his own series Cieli. In his canvases, perceptions belonging to the earthly dimension meet 3D objects. Natural and artificial, truth and fiction, painting and digital print take shape on a flat surface in an elegant and alienating dance. As the artist explains: “Experiences defined as natural such as witnessing a sunrise or sunset have been happening in video games since the beginning of their existence, making the digital experience relatable to the real one. At the same time, however, the natural experience coexists with the unusual and decontextualising element of the video game, the bug, the glitch”.

In Imbrunire and Aurora, the background, a sky in the hues of sunrise and sunset, is taken directly from video game screen shots and reproduced manually through the action of painting. The artist adds intricate, delicate, almost intangible grids through digital printing. These latter deter mine the contours of three-dimensional objects extracted from 3D files. Although everything revolves around antitheses, so much so that the works represent two opposite moments of the solar cycle, the final result is a perfect balance of geometric forms and abstraction.

Text by Erica Masseccesi

Stefano Riboli

Imbrunire

Enamel and UV print on canvas 70 x 50 cm 2022 Aurora Enamel and UV print on canvas 70 x 50 cm 2022

TUTT*

LIDIJA RISTIĆ

Lidija Ristic (b. Serbia, 1988) is an inter disciplinary Serbian-American artist based in Belgrade. She received her BFA in sculpture from the Massachu setts College of Art in Boston in 2010 and her MFA in Studio Art from New York University in 2021. Her work has been shown in group and solo exhi bitions in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Berlin, Leipzig and Belgrade. In the summer of 2021, she was invited as an artist-in-residence for three months at the international art programme Pilotenkueche in Leipzig, Germany.

Having always been a lover of drawing and painting, her practice has led her to prefer sculpture, although, in her composition and use of colour, her painterly training remains evident. The fearless use of colour and the creation of objects that explore secret worlds are just some of the characteristics of her art. The essence of her practice is the creation of hybrids and amalgama tions and the seamless fusion of digital processes, traditional craftsmanship and a wide range of artistic techniques. Her primary objective is to explore the nature of perceptions, creating non-li near realities somewhere between abstraction and augmented reality: “I strive to create complexity and collisions between the real and the artificial, to create connections between media and stimulate the senses” through the layering of both physical and meaning that the work takes on from the combination of mediums used.

The pieces often made from the mate rial to the digital become the subjects of photographic, video and audio still life works, thus creating a dialogue between the virtual and the concrete realm.

“Dripping Pierced Sinew” is, in some ways, a visual poem. It is constructed from three elements, each of which could stand alone as an individual work. Each piece was created by simultaneously considering the surface treatment and the substructure in an inverse process to traditional sculpture. In this work, one can see how the ‘skeleton’ gives the objects their elemental form and how the surface materials, primarily textiles, show the manipulation of the substrates on which they rest. This work aims to explore the relationship between surface and interior: how do these two realities, the inner and the outer, relate to and influence each other? “I have set up this visual structure to explore the relationship we humans have between our body surface and our inner workings, that is, the relation ship between the physical and emotional components.”

Text by Laura Pieri

Lidija Ristić

Dripping Pierced Sinew Mixed media

150 x 58 x 55 cm 2022

DAVIDE ROBALDO

Davide Robaldo (b. 1994) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Turin. He began his creative career as a curator at the Azimut Cultural Association after earning a BA in Design and Visual Communication from the Polytechnic of Turin. Robaldo took part in various shows and art residencies, with his la test one entitled “LOAM” at Montagna Cortonese in 2021.

Davide develops his creative practice through painting, installation, sculp ture, and literary methods while remaining passionate about the con cept of nature in an urban setting. His most recent research examines how people and their surroundings — society and nature — interact and come together. This research aims to create an artistic ritual that can unite people: an exploration that alternates between nature and urbanisation in a historical era where picturing their connection is crucial. The artist explores what it means to cohabit with nature in the city; by using oil, pigment and charcoal, he establishes a relationship with the setting, shape, and materials.

The plant is the protagonist and the central element of this study of the interaction between people and nature in urban settings. The concept that Robaldo calls post-nature is inex tricably related to human care and is alluded to by the thought of a plant embedded in concrete.

The interdependence between humans and the environment tends to be distorted as we use our houses and urban greenery with a specific function in mind, under the connotation of care and service. Care is conveyed through a hierarchical control mechanism that frequently sees the community controlling the plant based on the services it can provide. Davide’s ultimate question through his artworks is: should we reevaluate this system? Encourage the plant ecosystems to return to their origins, to establish a connection and equitable cohabitation?

Text by Maria Myasnikova

Davide Robaldo La Cattivita Delle Piante

pigment, and charcoal on canvas Cement and iron frame

x

x 5 cm

ROKSOLANA ROHOVS’KA

Roksolana Rohovs’ka (b. 1998) is a visual artist who has been moving between places, cultures, and apartments since she was a child, travelling around Moldova, Ukraine, and Italy. For this reason, she calls herself an uprooted and nomadic person. Her artistic rese arch is built around the feeling of not belonging geographically and socially. Her works address the fragmentation of social relations and the lost relation ships with nature and the animal that began with the construction of the capitalist world and the privatisation of land. She is currently attending a bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and, in September 2022, starts her Erasmus at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Rohovs’ka’s artistic practice is full of cross-references, metaphors and antitheses, poised between works in which the aspect of denunciation is more significant and those in which she seeks an escape route into fiction. In the video work Hunting Me, the artist stages a veritable fairy tale, a dreamlike tale populated by apparitions that are not quite human. The protagonist is an ambiguous being, no longer human but not yet animal. The crown she wears is her mask, an artifice far more accurate than the face it con ceals. She seems to be inside a lucid dream, a blurred reality that is difficult to focus on.

“I am the animal and at the same time the hun tress; not properly human, somewhere between a goat-like animal and a melancholic witch, but ultimately always human. This ambiguous image is rendered to the viewer as seductive and, at the same time, terrifying and occult. We are attracted to other knowledge, which we identify as magic, but we are also used to being afraid of it. Horror and the goat, horror and hircus, are etymologically conjoined. These roles combine in the same character and are part of a staging of improvisation, an unwritten theatrical interpretation. The digital eye, omnipresent and hidden like the sights of a shotgun, alternates with the dreamlike visions of a frontal setting, as on a stage.”

Text by Erica Massaccesi

Bibliography of the artist: Silvia Federici, Witch Hunt, War on Women, NERO, 2020

Nun Group, Revolutionary Demonology, NERO, 2020 Teresa Macrì, Performance Slippages. Volume 1. Years 1960-2000, Postmediabooks, 2020 Giorgio Agamben, Pulcinella ovvero Divertimento per li regazzi, Nottetempo, 2016

Filmography: Šarūnas Bartas, Few Of Us, 1996 Šarūnas Bartas, The House, 1997 Andrej Tarkovskij, Nostalghia, 1983

Roksolana Rohovs’ka

me

GABRIELE ROSATI

Mother as container.

Mother as content.

A container inside a container inside a container = matryoshka. Mother: a city, mine my city: a container of stories. A story within a story within a story = metanarrative. Mother = an imaginary city = su(l)rrealismo. In the bedroom: you and me, mom Of su(l)rrealisimo. Our hugs. The ties. Between rooms. That’s how Gabriele Rosati (b.1996) describes “Ventidue Agosto”, the artist book presented at ReA! Fair. The Ita lian photographer portrays his work as an urgency, an urgent need to build, a necessity to create imagery compo sed of empty spaces, empty stories, which can be open and flexible simultaneously. An interchangeable journey made up of elements that generate vertigo, a plunge into infinity, in which Rosati seeks a constant bo dy-to-body contact with an imagined city, a pretext for creating something dedicated and inspired by his mother.

With this work, the artist poses questions on the conception of su(l)rrealismo, is it above or below us? Is it inside or outside of us? Is it real or imaginary? With this piece, he talks about us all, about the meaning of human interactions. Rosati’s practice is heavily research-based; he looks into his relationships with other people, friends, the known and the unknown. His gaze is one of the most striking elements that can be perceived and felt in his pictures, how he portrays not only people but places and objects by borrowing surrealist features and making them fit with his odd, dreamlike universe. The artist considers himself a collector, a collector of things that can be every-thing and no-thing at the same time. Rosati is fascinated with all things that please or disturb him; he observes them, assimilates them and then aims at materializing them following his bizarre aesthetics. His work is very physical, as he believes that his hands are the best medium through which he can retell his stories. Rosati perceives his body as a recorder of moments that can become memories of today, yesterday and maybe even tomorrow.

Text by Vittoria Martinotti

Gabriele

MUZ (SAMUEL ROSI)

Samuel Rosi, also known as MUZ (b. 1995, San Miniato) lives and works between Cerreto Guidi and Milan, where he graduated in visual arts majoring in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera. He has had two solo exhibitions; Drive In, Mechetti S.R.L, Capannori (LU) curated by GianGuido M. Grassi in 2019 and Corium, Casaconcia consortium, San Miniato (PI) curated by M. Casella in 2020. MUZ has participa ted in collective exhibitions such as; Effetto Serra at the Museum of Natural History, Certosa, Calci (PI), curated by M. Nuti with a text by A. Ioalè in 2019, (Very) Young Italians curated by E. Monti in collaboration with AucArt in 2020, Degree Show at Palazzo Monti in Bre scia, also curated by E. Monti in 2020, Marcello in presenza at Estuario project space, curated by Estuario in 2021 and Visibilia at Palazzo Ducale, Gubbio (PG), curated by I. Puliafito.

MUZ is opening up urban, industrial settings or natural landscapes to unfo reseen spatial dimensions through ar chitectural and sculptural interventions. The pre-existing organic, morphological as well as historical aspects of the scenes hosting his works, become evi dent influences in the construction of structures yearning to enhance these places that are sometimes devoid of function. Marginal, hollow sites are re defined, acquiring newfound purpose as the artist builds gateways between parallel realities in order to confront temporal domains. Compositions of restorative nature infiltrate the space, ultimately altering the environment around their limits, erasing once visible attributes to reveal other potential perspectives.

On the occasion of the fair, MUZ presents Focali #4 as well as a site-specific piece that makes reference to mausoleum templates present at Cimitero Monu mentale and also to decorative oriental elements found in neighboring Via Paolo Sarpi - both locations surround the ex tramway and railway factory Fabbrica del Vapore complex. MUZ works towards establishing a dialectical, synergic re lationship between the installation and the context in which it is implemented, questioning the conception of spaces with regards to cultural perception.

Text by Paola Shiamtani

MUZ (Samuel Rosi) Focali #4 2022 olive ash wood 200 x100 cm

FRANCESCA ROSSI

Francesca Rossi (b. Milano, 1995) is a visual artist living and working in Milan. Ever since 2019 she has been actively participating in the production of video works, supporting the planning of exhibitions and conferences, organizing and realizing the archive of pictorial, sculptural, video and performance works as Adrian Paci’s Assistant. In 2018 she completed her Bachelor’s degree in Communication and Art Didactics from Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera and in 2019 she graduated in Photography and Visual Design from NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti. She has participated in shows such as Ph.ocus, Paratissima in Turin in 2018 and 2021, Ritorno del rimosso on the occasion of Walk-In Studio in Milan and Fair Cluster in London in 2020, Stardust | Photography and western mythology, MUFOCO, Cinisello Balsamo and Abstract, curated by Independent artists, Busto Garolfo in Milan in 2019.

Francesca Rossi’s practice revolves around illustrated, photographic and filmic representations of psychoso matic interactions and bodily mani festations of her innermost personal thoughts. The series of digital images she produces bring out details that are hardly ever seen by the naked eye, almost invisible, generating an intima te dimension of self-exploration. Her photographs are often shot seconds apart, as the subject maneuvers between individually shot frames, finally appearing to exhibit indepen dent motion within the series as a whole, even if static.

Having experienced panic attacks for many years, has brought the artist to realize the series Autoritratto - Tensioni, depicting muscles in her own arms, hands and fingertips contracting as a result of the episodes. Once these attacks stopped, she reflected on how that panic transmuted, undertaking different forms of physical symptoms and sensations of fear. By also revisiting these incidents of anxiety and muscle discomfort almost compulsively, Rossi composes a diary in fragments. The artist’s research focuses on examining uncontrollable repetition and through unconventional self-por traiture she studies tics and outbursts while attempting to seize control and gain a deeper understanding of such conditions, to find comfort in tension and breathe.

Text by Paola Shiamtani

Francesca Rossi

Autoritratto - Tensioni digital photography

2021

ELEANOR SANGHARA

Eleonor Sanghara was born in 1998 in Somerset, United Kingdom. Between 2019 and 2022, she graduated with B.A. (Hons) in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, London. In 2022 she exhibited during the exhibition PAS SING FOR WHITE, PASSING FOR ASIAN at Kupfer Gallery, London and during Bloomberg New Contemporaries. She was shortlisted for the Second Round at the South London Gallery. She lives and works in London.

Sanghara’s work focuses on racial prejudices that pass through and use algorithmic technology. This research is concretised within the digital domain itself and takes shape as performances enacted in the virtual spaces of video production. The artist uses the self-con tained phrase “the-glitched-mixed-body” to describe her performance practice, bringing decolonial perspectives on how biracial bodies are visualised in a new media landscape. As the artist is the child of a mixed couple, she renders her experience of bi-racialised bodies to reveal the algorithms of normative power that regulate gender, sexuality and race by tracing binary and colonial images.

The aim is to regain possession of the collective body to realise different forms of connection. Whether they are body-machine or body-body, they seek to overturn the knowledge of be longing and location that the system imposes. Thus, the artist creates a mild space between home and el sewhere, between the known and the unknown, in which the boundaries of scientific narratives are lost to unlearn and relearn.

Who becomes primitive and disen franchised by our digital engagement? This is the central question being asked through the video FAME PRAYER.

Access, truth and memory are incom plete even within structures we consider complete because heteropatriarchal networks establish them. Questions of authorship, representation, digital fraud and post-production control over racial identities are questioned. The simple computer screen becomes a table for a series of deconstructions and recon figurations to explore the potential of di gital objects but examine their colonial structure sedimented in Western histo rical ideals.

Text by Milena Zanetti

Eleanor Sanghara FAME PRAYER

HD video, colour, sound, looped

ELISA SCHIAVINA

Elisa Schiavina was born in Pavia in 1992; she currently lives and works in Milan. After studying psychology, in 2021, she began her studies at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, attending the two-year specialisation course in painting. She recently participated in the group exhibition at the end of the residency promoted by Presa Multipla, at the independent spaces of Rumah Largo, in Rome. Also, this year, she took part in the group exhibition ‘SguardiII’ at Galleria Lorenzelli in Milan, curated by Marco Casentini and Dany Vescovi, and created a site-specific work for the exhibition project cura ted by Osservatorio Futura and the Lunetta 11 gallery, spread across the Langhe area.

Schiavina’s painting finds a meeting point with her interest in psychology and, in particular, with Lacan’s thought linked to the concept of desire under stood as an intimate and, at the same time, unknown part of one’s being and sexuality. The subjects painted by the artist refer to the theme of play and childhood, a moment of particular importance for constructing one’s desire, which is realised through deprivation, limitation and the percei ved emptiness in the search for the object of enjoyment. The worlds that come to life in Schiavina’s paintings and installations are therefore popu lated by fantastic creatures, caught between childhood and adulthood, in that limbo between awareness and carefreeness. They are immersed in hyper-contemporary environments, full and vivid colours reflecting today’s digital and over-excited context.

The pictorial and sculptural works proposed for the occasion embody the aforementioned childlike imagery through the creation and repetition of subject objects, as the artist herself defines them, linked to her childhood. These elements, recognisable among the different works and contextualised in a more collective and social dimension, seek to latch onto the viewer’s memory simultaneously. Through the represen tational element, Schiavina plays with the possibilities and ambivalences of narration, leaving the actions depicted on canvas open to unclear conclu sions. Gattona and Familiare come l’odore dell’happy meal are expedients to create a narrative about ambiguity.

Text by Milena Zanetti

Elisa Schiavina

Gattone alla festa Acrylic on canvas 40 x 50 x 3 cm

Familiare come l’odore dell’happy meal

Oil and acrylic on canvas 20 x 15 x 1 cm

Gattona Glazed ceramic 16 x 11 x 7 cm 2022

GIULIA SIVIERO

Giulia Siviero (b. 1993, Italy) lives and works in Berlin. In 2019, she received her Master’s degree in Graphic Design from the IUAV University of Venice, with an exchange year at the Academy of Fine Arts in Lyon, France. Recent exhi bitions include the two held in Berlin in 2021 – Boxenstopp at Spoiler Aktion Raum and Farblos at Störung Galerie – and Ante-Poster at the Fondazione Alberto Peruzzo in Padua in 2022. In addition to her pure artistic practice, she collaborates as a graphic designer with magazines such as Wired Italy.

The artist’s works are contemporary paintings in which traditional elements of painting practice, such as the form and context in which they are presented, are juxtaposed and integrated with graphic elements, thus creating a constantly evolving mix of physical and digital components. Inspired by the work of artists such as Albert Oehlen and Wade Guyton, she uses archive images or images she has made to offer a new interpretation of them, removing their original purpose and incorporating textures and brush strokes. “In my practice, a large part of the inspiration comes from offset and screen printing textures, which I find mainly in ar chival materials printed in the past, between the 1950s and 1970s; in photography, illustrations or simply in colour gradients.

Everyday elements also play an essential role, which I see and photograph inside my studio, such as a brushstroke in a piece of fabric; or outside, urban elements and details that can be seen and used in other contexts [...] I like to think of the aspect of painting as a physical tool that allows me to go and modify specific details that will then give another perception of the work.”

“The inside of the car was like an oven” is a work composed of compositional layers mixed with different elements, lines and colours. The geometric shapes in the foreground allow a glimpse of the features inside and behind them, creating an additional framing. The image thus formed is again modified by the painting support, which changes its shape during the print run. Finally, the act of painting, in turn, adapts again, creating an unexpected fluidising effect.

Text by Laura Pieri

Siviero

ANDRÉA SPARTÀ

Andréa Spartà (b. 1996) is a French artist who lives and works in Dijon. He studied Experimental and Concrete Music at the Regional Conservatory of Chalon-Saone, followed by Fine Art at the National School of Fine Art in Dijon. Spartà had held exhibitions at venues like the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole, the Cité Internationale des Arts de Paris, and the Kunsthalle Bern, with his most recent show entitled LÉCHER L’OURS in May 2022 at the Galerie Interface in Dijon.

Andréa is interested in the objects that surround us, what he calls choses compagnes – companion things –among which we live our lives and their impact and effect on us. The artist establishes a relationship with these things by paying attention to them as they are often things we overlook, yet we experience them daily. For instance, these days, he is susceptible to paint scratches on doors, blue plastic bags, crumpled cushions, and the shutter on a train’s light; despite being unusual, that is how the artist genuinely perceives things. He once used fruit in his artwork, but it was more of a living entity than actual food since Andrea is more interested in specifics than general principles. Through his works, Spartà allows us to observe their condition and relationships through an altered image and a singularized view of what is around us by treating them as subjects instead of objects. He creates chimaeras between the things we see and the memories at tached to these objects – seeking out the elements that comprise society and the common goods.

I try to interact with them without overpowering them and seek out their rightful place to better identify ours. That is an existential political and ecological concern.

The artwork presented at the Fair is a large sculpture composed of two elements entitled Double Barque; it ba lances on the verge of familiarity and phenomenology as it simultaneously evokes images of a basket and a boat. This sculpture, made out of wicker by a skilled basket maker, Marguerite Her lant, aims to convey a universal idea by changing from a well-known object to a singularity.

I don’t use the word “decoration” when talking about my artworks, but “ornament” because an ornament is something added, not something that is an object in itself. For example, a beautiful table can be both decorative and functional. An ornament can only be so mething more. It can be a part of the table that makes it decorative, but the table can still exist without it. I do not believe that adorning only for adorning is a pointless gesture in contrast to a somehow beneficial method; instead, I think that it mirrors our way of being. Since adorning has no logic, it serves as a metaphor for how pointless our existence is. It’s not a pessimistic viewpoint; instead, it’s a homage to that which exists for no other reason than to live — simply being here because we are.

Text by Maria Myasnikova

Andréa Spartà

Double Barque

Braided wicker 240 x 200 x 60 cm

NINA SUMARAC

Nina Sumarac (b.1972) is a Ser bian-Cypriot visual and intermedia artist living and working in Limassol, Cyprus. She attended the Polytechnic University for New Technologies in New Belgrade, where she studied mechanical engine ering and computer numerical control systems. She earned a BFA from Buckinghamshire New University in the United Kingdom, as well as a Postgra duate Diploma in Fine Art from Cyprus College of Art in Larnaca. The Ministry of Education and Culture, Cyprus fun ded the presentations of three of her projects and her works became part of permanent collections of State Gallery of Contemporary Cyprus Art, Municipal Gallery Limassol, Byzantium Museum in Nicosia, and many private collections. Sumarac has had ten solo exhibitions and has participated in numerous international exhibitions. She is one of three founders of the contemporary art group Arboreal Collective.

An abstract vision of the machine pro cessing bodily matter, offers an insight to a personal visceral dimension, as the artist investigates our perception and experience of our own bodies in relation to the scientific introspective of the body. As vigilant lenses observe Sumarac’s intestinal tract, compu ter-generated, glitching matter suggests us becoming increasingly aware of technological representations of our anatomy. Through mechanical eyes the artist’s research focuses on finding ways to heal by exploring key human behaviors, biopolitics and emerging tech. At a time when artificially intel ligent life forms or algorithms con stantly cross paths and fuse with the organic, Nina Sumarac philosophically, poetically and metaphorically interprets the state and transitions between two contrasting conditions and their impact on ever-evolving human nature and social relationships.

Text by Paola Shiamtani

E:SCOPE is a video recording of a computer processing an endoscopic examination of the human intestinal tract filmed originally by a luminous fiber-optic camera. This abstracted imagery seen through the machine’s eye offers us a new vision of unexpected insight by revealing the unseen yet experienced aspects of our being, at the same time questioning the degree to which our perception of reality and its physicality is monitored by what we see and hear.

The piece was primarily curated by James Bradle, Helene Black and Yiannis Colakides for the exhibition Through Ma chine Eyes at NeMe Arts Centre, Limassol. Most recently has been exhibited at Stories of Intimacy, 2022, at The Limassol Munic pal Arts Center, curated by Mariza Bargilly and at the IDMAA MEDIA ART EXHIBITION 2022: WEIRD MEDIA, at the Winona State University in Minnesota, curated by Patrick Lichty.

Nina Sumarac

E:SCOPE video with sound Length: 17:08 in a loop Music: As Fast as You Can Happen (22:14); Composer: Junior85 CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 Original video footage: Colonoscopy by DR Costas Christodoulou 2019

Francesco Tagliavia (b. 1992) is a Sicilian born, Milan based multidisciplinary designer. But he quickly adds that this introduction “sounds impressive, but it mostly means that I am quick to learn and easily bored.” However, his creativity is far from dull, as he skilfully spans different media, from film directing, photography, and graphic and fashion design. Tagliavia studied New Techno logies for the Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania; after graduating, he moved on and is currently attending Fashion and Textile Design at NABA in Milan. During his formative years, the artist soon began exhibiting his work by taking part in several group exhibitions: in 2014, he participated in the show Give Way to Give a Way, curated by Giuseppe Lana in Berlin, and in 2018 with Angelo Licciardello, he exhibited that’s it!, curated by Lo renzo Balbi at the MAMbo Museum, Bologna. Later his work was shown in Turin, Courmayeur and London exhibi tions, where his video “The Holy How” was first shown at Tate Exchange as part of the collective exhibition “Higher Resolution’’ by Hypen Labs. Recently his production landed on the famous NFT platform Decentraland with “Travel Diary”, a virtual exhibition curated by Sonia Belfiore. In 2021, the year of his NFT debut, Tagliavia was featured in a solo exhibition titled BLUE MEMES at Artissima Fair.

TAGLIAVIA

As the name of his recent show and piece suggests, the artist places his body of work on the fine line between humour and melancholy. For the Fair, Tagliavia brings a new artwork, “Fiaba”, which he defines as a physical repre sentation of a narrative plot. The spinning of a loom, a central tool in his work as a fashion designer, forms the inspirational basis of this work. The artist borrows iconic elements from the fairy tales that inhabited his childhood and weaved them onto leather production scraps. Ultimately the leather figures are locked at their intersections by metal rivets. The resulting object can dialogue with the environment in which it is placed: it can be hung, laid on the floor, or curved by taking advantage of wall corners. It adds a different spatial possibility to not only the setting but also a narrative dimension.

Text by Lucia Pievani

Francesco Tagliavia Fiaba

SOFIA TALANTI

Sofia Talanti was born in Florence in 1995. In 2019 she graduated with a Master’s degree in Design of museum layouts and paths at the Institute for Art and Restoration Palazzo Spinelli in Florence, and between 2014-2018 she obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara. She took part in The Wrong Biennale (2019-2020) and, in 2021, participated in the artist residency Margine di Heterotopie Dissidenti in Florence. This year she participated in the group exhibition at the end of the residency promoted by Presa Multipla, at the independent spaces of Rumah Largo, in Rome.

Talanti has always been interested in plastic matter within the digital world. The study of new technologies for the artist passes through 3d manipulation, rendering and video animations that very often take their follow-up in the physical world through sculptural installations made through 3d printers. Curiosity toward technologies is driven by the different possibilities that sculpture can take on in the digital, elevating it to a paranormal level and making it take on unexpected forms. The materiality of sculpture is conta minated by pixels and vectors shaped through computerised records, giving rise to a new perception of matter and a new sensibility. Techniques have allowed the artist to explore different contexts and themes while remaining linked to the algorithmic code.

They begin with experiments on fractal nature, then culminating in current issues and social critiques related to space in the separation between physical and digital.

The digital print Spikes Plugs reports an abstract composition in which we re cognize only an assemblage of possible objects related to sexual pleasure. A dreamlike vision conceals references, forms and feelings through the choice of warm and metallic colours. A humoral bath exposes the lack of contact, affection and pleasure related to the physical world and analogue space. The artist’s vision seeks to bring back to a collective dimension the sense of distance that bodies may feel with each other in the constant search for connection and the construction of their own identity.

Text by Milena Zanetti

Sofia Talanti Spikes Plugs

TETAU

tetau is an artistic duo formed by Bea trice Zito and Edoardo Montaccini and active in the field of visual research. Their artistic training began for both of them in Urbino: Zito studied Graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts while Montaccini studied Multimedia Arts.

Zito then graduated in Photography and Languages of Visual Communi cation at Cfp Bauer in Milan, and at the same institution, she attended the High Specialization Course in Visual Publishing. Montaccini, after a two-year course in Photography Forms and Methods, currently works as an intern at Francesco Jodice’s studio.

Together they started the duo tetau and recently founded a second interdiscipli nary collective with other artists, 1gFeU.

The duo brings two single-copy artist’s books to the Fair: fossi tu come me io come te and vai vieni con me, designed as an appendix to the former. On the back of the first book, a sentence explains the process that led to its pages: “A mirror was inserted into a photocopier, and a photocopy was produced. The photocopy was in turn copied, and so on.”

Erosion is not a loss of information but rather a shift from one sensibility to another, precisely a translation. Every representation results from an attempt at translating and is dictated by the sensitivity of the apparatus that produces it. The artists pushed the device to act against its code, bringing out its automatism.

The artists thus initiated a continuous transcription of information smoothed out time after time in the repeated transition from analogue to digital. If the starting point is a photocopied mirror, the endpoint is a work that is simulta neously performative in its making and sculptural in the thickness of the photo copies that form each book.

The whole process leads to the absence of the image, the absolute monochrome. Zito and Montaccini, interviewed for ATP diary, explain: “we didn’t make the image vary; she did it herself; it is part of her morphology.” Both works presented at the Fair are em blematic of tetau’s strong interest in the processes of deconstruction and sedi mentation, in which the duo recognizes implementations of possibility. Through redirections and circularities, tetau tends to erase the visual and iconicity.

Text by Lucia Pievani

tetau vai vieni con me

ENEA TOLDO

Enea Toldo was born in Locarno in 1988 and currently lives and works in Milan. He recently exhibited during the group show BLUESHOUSE, curated by Giada Olivotto at BluesHouse, Milan. In 2021 he took part in the group exhibition Alle Ortiche, curated by Eleonora de Biasi and Irene Crosta at Serre di San Nicola in Genoa and the same year in Costellazioni at Galleria espositiva El Bagnin De Gorla, Milan.

Toldo’s painting is developed around the study of the concept of the natural, starting with the choice of materials on which he paints. The frame is often created from discarded materials, and the canvas is chosen for its natural qualities. Very often made of jute, the canvas is then always treated with a compound created with earth, mine ral powders and vegetable fibres that will serve not only as a preparatory but also a pictorial basis for the subjects that will be revealed. The latter is also a continuation of the research advan ced by the materials: the natural world is studied through its social dynamics from which surreal narratives arise that are reflected in anthropological experience.

In the painting Totentaz, the artist started from studies carried out in the botanical garden of Niguarda (Milan), a garden forgotten in which plants continued to create their ideal habitat for survival. Studies reported on small-format plates but gave the artist the opportunity to create a new narrative once back in his studio.

Starting with a story from Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, in which the last living dinosaur finds himself in a community of new creatures inhabiting the planet and is mocked as an alien being, Toldo similarly imagines his succulent crea tures in a barren and desolate world in which man is now extinct. Carefully, the painted image reveals two smiling skulls formed by vegetation, which mock the viewer. Just as the dinosaur remains unseen in the eyes of the surviving floral world, in this case, the public replaces the mocked dinosaur.

In a large-scale painting on which, Toldo simultaneously applied several five plasters of clay, sand and plant fibre to which he mixed natural pigment powders, succeeding in restoring a warm desert-like atmosphere to the landscape that forms the background of the vegetation. The painting is part of a more extensive series of works entitled Catharsis, in which the artist explores the possible dystopian developments of society concerning climate change. The selection of materials thus becomes a stylistic choice and a demonstration that different ways of creating art and new objects are possible without ne cessarily producing more waste.

Text by Milena Zanetti

Enea Toldo Totentaz

Watercolour and pigment on clay 147 x 202 cm 2022

GIANLUCA TRAMONTI

Born in Livorno in 1992, Gianluca studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, specialising in Graphic Art, and in 2021 he completed a two-year course in New Expressive Languages, also in Florence. He attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp for a three-year study. In 2019 he worked in Berlin at Rolando Anselmi Gallery and specialised in Graphic Art at the “Il Bisonte” Foundation in Florence. Since 2020 he has worked as an artist’s assi stant between Florence and Milan. He currently lives and works in Milan.

Tramonti’s work focuses on the mi cro-actions that characterise human beings in their linguistic expression. The actions on which the artist focuses are often collective actions that are part of the social memory and have been a symptom of aggregation or protest behaviour. Situations in every day life remain linked to the gesture of the graphic sign as a testimony of a passage, an event, or a thought. Activities come to life in the public dimension and space in the form of writings engraved on walls, banners, street demonstrations, or sculptural monuments. Tramonti seeks to take from this context objects, images, and documents that he brings back to his public in their entirety, a sort of ready-made that revises the functio nality of these objects, often totally overturned to focus on form rather than content.

The graffiti frottages are also documents or “self-declarations”, as the artist defines them as casts of writings and engravings that we are not sure whether they existed or were reproduced by the artist. Traces of comments found on public walls and then brought back to paper through the passage of the pencil are mixed with personal relics of the artist reproduced and cast from the walls of his studio. The intimate and imaginary sphere binds with the physical and collective one: ambiguity tries to play with the concept of fake by posing a question about the natural capacity to convey a message, leaving visual and material evidence of it.

Text by Milena Zanetti

Gianluca Tramonti

MURO

21 cm x 29.7 cm each Graphite on paper 2019 - ongoing

MATTEO URBANI

Matteo Urbani (b.1987, Teramo) lives and works in Milan. In 2013 he received his master’s degree in Energy and Nuclear Engineering at the University of Bologna. After several years of working as a project manager of building and energy projects in Italy and abroad (EU Horizon 2020, EXPO Milan 2015) he decided to pursue an artistic career. In 2019 he attended the first year of Painting at the Academy of Bologna (chair prof. Leonardo Santoli). In 2020, he moved to Milan to complete the second and third years (chair prof. Maurizio Arcangeli) at the Brera Academy. He writes about cinema on the blog Cronosfera Magazine since 2021 and since 2022 has formed together with three other Brera artists a collective that focuses on the relationship between art and artificial intelligence.

Matteo Urbani investigates the ways in which individuals interact with te chnological apparatus as well as the long lasting presence of machines on earth having great impact and ultima tely altering the natural environment. Sculptural, exposed industrial com ponents and organic elements fuse to produce abstract reactions, as Urbani constructs experimental assemblages generating electrical currents. Urbani is interested in bridging the gap between expertise in manufacturing and passive operating of everyday, domestic appliances.

“The speed of technological changes is indi rectly proportional to geomorphological ones. The research that I am undertaking (...) is attempting to simplify technological inventions and to bring them back to their origins, thus to the ecosystem from which the machine was shaped and to which it will eventually return to, ending its days.”

recover is a sonic installation consisting of unconventional materials, among which a repurposed, no longer opera tional printer, plastic sheet and cotton fabric. The artist had buried the cloth deep in the ground, only to retrieve it after a period of time, the surface now manifesting traces of contact with a subterranean dimension. The compo sition circuit activates through the use of ecographic gel, amplifying waves received from the inanimate objects.

Text by Paola Shiamtani

Matteo Urbani

ANNA VILLA

Anna Villa (b. 1999) is an Italian artist based in Triuggio, a small town in Brianza. Her artistic research is strongly influenced by the place where she lives: a wooded and mystical area. She is enrolled at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, currently attending the third year of her bachelor’s degree in Decoration. Villa has participated in the CoffeeBreak.Museum 6^edition (Museo Della Ceramica C. Gianetti, 2021), winning the special mention award, and in the FRM Project - Ferrara Ravenna Milan 2021, where she has created four permanent works for the city of Ravenna. She is also working as an assistant to Corrado Riva, owner of Fornace Artistica in Briosco.

At first, came the bones, and then the cera mics. Villa walked around her home on red clay soil for days and months. There, she discovered a spiritual and devoted connection with that mysterious place and the nature that animates it. She walked and perceived around her a primordial force, but also finiteness, limit, death. The earth is transformative, holding the seed and the dead body, hiding something and giving it back, renewed. The bone, the skull, wrapped in clay, is clasped in an embrace of new matter. The earth becomes the inspiration for a rebirth, for a new form. For the artist, this new form is the ceramics, which like the earth, envelop the remains of a body with maternal gentleness.

Da materia osso a materia terra III (2021), as well as all her recent works, expresses this concept perfectly; the animal skull is encased in clay, and the darker veins emerge from the glow of the glaze, making it a precious artefact that the earth has bestowed.

Similarly, Appartenenza alla terra (2022) is based on a sentimental and personal vision of the natural world. Villa aims to return her perspective to viewers, seeking a connection to what frightens her the most as the first step toward rebirth. A bird’s wing, luminous and iridescent, thus returns to new life. Her practice also includes drawings on paper, inten ded as studies for sculptures—sketches made in charcoal and egg tempera, which seem as textural as the raku pottery works. The funereal and gloomy spirit does not abandon these works either, while the force of the ongoing metamorphosis is always clearly visible.

Text by Erica Massaccesi

Anna Villa

Appartenenza alla terra Raku pottery

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MARIKA VITRANI

Marika Vitrani (b.1999) is an Italian visual artist born in Milan but currently residing in Cologno Monzese (MI). She first attended NABA, where she obtained her bachelor’s degree in Painting and Visual Arts, in 2021, and she is now enrolled in the first year of the two-year specialisation degree in New Technologies of Art, focusing on media such as cinema and video, at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, in Milan.

Vitrani’s artistic research focuses on mechanisms that articulate the human vision, aspects that stem from the ongoing relationship between the physical body and technology. Accor ding to the artist, the contemporary era is characterised by a progressive loss of tangible concreteness in favour of an immaterial, confusing dimension. In Vitrani’s works, the artist adopts an experimental approach, playing with different media while allowing her practice to be guided by images as a continuous reference to something else. The artist is not bound to a specific expressive medium; she has challenged herself with pictorial, sculptural and photographic projects using different materials such as wood, plexiglass and clay. However, the artist’s fascination with manu facturing a multi-sensory experience makes her fond of moving images and sound. The aim is to create an im mersive experience with the viewer, articulated beyond the mere enjoy ment of the work.

For the Fair, the artist presents “Mor phing”, a work aimed at investigating the illusory relationship belonging to the digital image. The work refers to one of the first digital effects developed by the film industry, consisting of the gradual transformation between two different images. When looking at the screen, a strong attraction to the fluidity and constant shifting of lines and colours swallow us whole, vortexed into hypno sis where it becomes impossible to di stinguish reality from fiction. In the same way, the artist wants to draw a parallel with nature by reproducing a similar result through the flow of water, waiting for the fire to start burning the film, and thus revealing the deception, suggesting that only through the dismantling of the superstructures that controls our reality we can get closer to the truth.

Text by Vittoria Martinotti

Marika Vitrani Morphing Colour video 7’11’’ 2022

NOAH ISMAEL WYSS

Noah Ismael Wyss (b.1999) is a Swiss artist living and working in Lucerne, currently studying at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, having previously graduated from Ecole d’Arts Visuels Biel/Bienne (20182019). Among recent group exhibitions; Finding Balance, Alte Schreinerei, Bern and All Inclusive Festival, 745 Viscosistadt, Emmenbrücke, Switzerland in 2022, as well as Sammlung im Dialog, Museum Sankturbanhof, Sursee and Was wünscht du dir?, Shed im Eisenwerk, Winterthur in 2021. In 2019 Wyss had a solo exhibition at the Mal:Mal Galerie art space in Bern, entitled Wald.

The interdisciplinary research of Noah Ismael Wyss studies both natural and digital spaces in relation to human evolution. At the threshold between tangible and intangible environments, the artist observes the ways in which these realms fuse through combina tions of organic resources, digitally rendered forms and found industrial objects. Machine learning algorithms are a creative tool for Wyss to translate entities conceived in an artificial dimension into artifacts. To bring AI compositions into the physical world, they experiment by training simulated neural nets - computing systems that mimic biological neural networks - in order to produce algorithmically gene rated imagery deriving from abundant, online databases of pictures.

Texture Mapping Thesis is an ongoing project, presented during this third edition of ReA! Art Fair, an installation exploring symbiotic relationships and contrasting terrain. The piece is made up of soil, stones and wood as well as a photogrammetry texture printed on silk cloth that lies on top of and completes the sculptural assemblage. Gathered natural material gives shape to the cloth from underneath it, forming craters, dunes, valleys or rivers; defining the topography of the pixeled land surface. Wyss creates an illusion of a glitch-like virtual body floating weightless in the exhibition space, while considering the primordial elements that serve as inspi ration and foundations when inventing or constructing cyber worlds.

Text by Paola Shiamtani

Noah Ismael Wyss

Texture Mapping Thesis installation soil, stones, wood, printed silk 2021 - ongoing project

XAARCHIVE is an interdisciplinary studio founded in 2020 and concerned with technological development in the fields of Design and Architecture. The collective was founded in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by Nayla Cefaerlli and Sofia Lorenzo, two young artists and designers with an academic background in architecture. The studio is inclined to study and use software-based design and digital technologies; through data gathering and its management, they aim to reconstruct our relationship with nature and the non-human. XAAR CHIVE’s work revolves around real-life parameters and processes that the collective transfers into tech-based objects to intrigue and alert the viewer about their surroundings while raising awareness about political and social issues brought to the fore by climate change. XAARCHIVE think of their art as Objects; they aim at an efficient and purposeful way of creating works that are both functional and critical of the world surrounding them. The collective view their creation process as an intrinsic investigation, driven by research and field studies, an in-depth analysis of specific climate issues, and aims at conveying their messages in a compelling and alluring way. Technology and bio-design are key features and a constant in their work. Through algorithmic practices, arti ficial intelligence, and data mapping, XAARCHIVE builds their designs.

For them, putting technology at the service of nature is the only way we will endure as a species. The collective be lieves in pursuing multiplicity as a form of design and values equally biological, artificial and human intelligence.

XAARCHIVE presents at the Fair a mu shroom grower or “Honguera” [Spanish], a sculptural object at the intersection of decorative, functional and productive practices. The 3D-printed mushroom holder raises questions about their con sumption and the multiplicity of organic species that could be living in domestic environments. The work is conceived as a collaboration between humans and fungi by picking and blending their features to create this post-anthro pocentric piece. Honguera’s design is algorithm-based and informed by a co ding process that allows the designers to devise an object controlled through a set of variables that can be infinitely iterated by creating each time a one-of-a-kind piece, as varied as the fungi it holds. With this piece, XAARCHIVE intends to redefine the categories of the human and the non-human made, technological and biological, natural and synthetic.

Text by Vittoria Martinotti

Honguera

3D printed recycled plastic (PLA), mycelium

Yue Yin (b. 1997) is a Chinese artist who lives and works in London. Yue is a member of the China Sculpture Institute. In his artworks, he uses various artistic mediums to illustrate his viewpoint on intercultural problems. Yin has taken part in several group exhibits at institutions, such as those in Battersea Park in London (2022), Laozi Plaza in Suzhou (2020), Sullivan Gallery in Chicago (2020), China Sculpture Museum in Datong (2018), Galerija Nevesinje in Nevesinje (2018), etc. Additionally, he has completed several large-scale public art com missions for various spaces.

The artist’s most recent research revolves around exploring cultural differences and identities; he utilises it to convey his studies of the concept of vulnerability and its dimensions as he lives and travels around the world.

To further develop this research, Yue investigates the analogies in natural and artificial environments - he is motivated by his experience of living through diseases and geopolitical wars. The artist’s fundamental, exi stential doubts - his place within the family and what it embodies, ethnic groups, society, and even virtual settings - begin with self-doubt and self-questioning; Yin uses and inve stigates these through his artworks. Yue examines potential outcomes for people who are not just confined to the present but also related to their history and future in various circumstances.

YIN

Chinese people are deeply attached to and experience a sense of belonging to their homeland. In Imagined Country, an 8-minute autobiographical video presented during the Fair, Yin interprets a land he has never visited. The artist is reminded of Yinjiaba and Ya’an as he con siders and pieces together his identity: Where I currently reside in Northeast China is an area populated mainly by immigrants. Essentially only the Manchu people were there before the 19th century. In the 1950s, my grandfather also emigrated to the Northeast. My study pertains to Northeastern humanities and migration as well as my family history.

Yue’s grandfather, a veteran of the Korean War, was from Yinjiaba – Yins’ Land. During the video creation, Yin spoke to his family members living hundreds of miles away from their home - Yins’ Land – many of whom had never been there – about what they observed, heard, imagined, thought and dreamed about. Throughout the video, the artist builds up the story by gathering artefacts, pictures, papers and testimonies: this artwork is not only do cumentation and resurrection of one’s identity but a journey on the path of answering the fundamental questions we all ask ourselves sometimes: Who am I? Where is my home? Do I belong?

Text by Maria Myasnikova

Imagined Homeland

KYRA ZHANG

Kyra Zhang (b. 1999) is a Chinese artist who lives and works in London. In 2022 she obtained a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths University of London. Kyra has participated in various exhibitions, with her latest one in July 2022 entitled Concept 2022 at the CICA museum in Seoul.

Zhang often creates participatory installation performances - she views the interaction and relationship betwe en the audience and the work as the artwork itself. The materials used to create the piece, items it contains, and location all contribute to the ambience it creates. An installation’s placement and presentation typically call for willing participants to do a particular activity to engage and communicate with the audience entirely. As an engagement occurs, a new connection is made between the artwork and the participants. The artist frequently implements an exchange of objects within her installations to study this relationship in various contexts. According to Kyra, only the audience can complete the transfor mation from an item to artwork.

The installation presented at the Fair is entitled Silent Auction a performative installation explicitly created for the exhibition. The audience is invited to interact with it by following a few simple steps. Firstly, one needs to complete a bid form provided; participants are in vited to submit their bids in the silent auction without announcing them.

This auction procedure changes people’s interactions to resemble commerce in a barter economy: people may view things that are put for auction and place bids on them. In contrast to a conventional au ction, this one does not explicitly allude to money or any accepted currency. While the bidder will submit the offer using the provided non-monetary funds, artists can pick anything they wish to use as the cur rency for the bid value of their artwork. As the artist puts it: Measuring the equivalent value is difficult in this case, but exchanging things is always possible.

Text by Maria Myasnikova

Kyra Zhang

Auction

ERJOLA ZHUKA

Erjola Zhuka (b. 1986, Durres, Albania) lives and works between Lucca and Milan. She studied Multimedia Arts and Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara. She has also obtained a Master in Photography at the Univer sity IUAV of Venice, where she atten ded numerous workshops alongside international artists such as Armin Linke, Josè Pedro Cortes, Bas Princen, Stefano Graziani etc. She has done an internship at the Cimenax studio in Lucca with Massimo Vitali and in Florence with Robert Pettena. In July 2020 she published her first limited edition book ODE TO MY FAMILY.

Recent exhibitions include; Winnersolo exhibition at Kranj Foto Fest 2021, International festival of contemporary photography (Slovenia, 2021), Seven Al banian Photographers, A Residency at the MARUBI National Museum of Photo graphy, Shkoder (Albania, 2019-2020) curated by Francois Cheval, duo show with Edson Luli Back and Forth, Again at the Black Box Genesis art space in Vaasa (Finland, 2021), Galerija Stolp in Maribor, Slovenia; Group show in the galleries: La Portineria and Satellite (Suburbia Contemporary) Florence. She has participated in the Art House School residency in Shkoder, Albania.

Between Italy and Albania, Erjola Zhuka composes an autobiographic visual memoir of everyday rituals, personal relationships and social interactions. In the artist’s words; “The geo-cultural dimension, caught between Italy and Albania, represents my past and my present, which coexist and feed off each other in a perverse game of symbolic and cultural cross-references.”

Zhuka sees photography as an instrument of reflection. By confronting intimate pho tographs within vast collections with one another, the artist initiates a long selection and editing process, in order to create expansive compositions. This method allows for Zhuka to open-up these images to wider dialectical dimensions and sub sequently to universal narratives.

MyTh-ing, exhibited during this third edi tion of ReA! Art Fair, is a series consisting of new pieces and works deriving from the Ode To My Family collection, an investi gation of spontaneous behaviors, fleeting moments, and raw settings through which symbolic elements make reference to individuality but also to collective memory or identity and to the shifting political climate. Zhuka’s compositions, frames of documented experiences and familiar surroundings, attempt to preserve the naturalness of the subject captured - suspending it in time - while bearing witness of a socio-cultural chan ge in paradigm.

Text by Paola Shiamtani

Erjola Zhuka MyTh-ing photography series 2021

DAVIDE ZULLI

Davide Zulli (b. 1993) is an Italian artist currently living in Antwerp, where he collaborates with various organisa tions in the Belgian scene. His works have been exhibited internationally, and recent exhibitions have been held at K.L.8 (Bruxelles, 2022), Open Studio De Dam (Antwerp, 2022) and Biennale Monza (Monza, 2021). He held a bachelor’s degree in Painting with Luca Bertolo from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and a master’s in Sculpture with Davide Rivalta from the same Academy. Between 2018 and 2019, he attended the Pxl-MAD Academy in Hasselt, Belgium.

Davide Zulli’s works transport visitors into another dystopian and alienating world. Through the concept of rem nants and ruins, the artist stages what can be perceived as a hypothetical apocalypse that induces the viewer to reflect on the present. Living in an unstable and changing historical era, Zulli investigates the relationship between man and nature, questioning the fundamental principles of reality and fiction. As a result, the concept of the Unmonumental has become central to his latest pictorial and installation works.

“Unmonumentality is a concept that emerges in the 21st century,” the artist explains, “when the fragility of the status quo is made more visible by terrorist attacks, climate change and, more generally, the increasing precocity of many people’s daily lives. I aim to examine the Unmonumental by using the imagination to connect seemingly disparate realities: the disturbing but well-designed world of fantasy, role-playing games, science fiction literature and the chaotic society in which we live’’.

If the two works, Steps of Humankind, are fragments of a dead forest, Fuoco Fauto is a lapidary monument dedicated to nature. The sense of loss is palpable all around, but even though this forest symbolises the end, particular objects call to mind a hidden, mystical force in the visitor’s mind. The amulets and rattles hanging from each plant allude to a sacred site, now extinct but a guardian of latent energy. In Fuoco Fauto, a hologram is also visible, representing the ghost of the spirit of na ture. “The fixation on resurrecting something,” Zulli continues, “that has been lost forever results in a misleading image, a ghost full of ‘errors’ or anomalies. The result is always something sinister that returns only to haunt the living for something wrong, just as we see in most horror films that deal with the theme of necromancy.”

Text by Erica Massaccesi

Davide Zulli

Fuoco Fauto

Epoxy concrete, iron, orographic fan 310 x 45 x 20 cm

Steps of Humankind

Epoxy concrete, iron, bells and pendants 123 x 45 x 20 cm

Steps of Humankind

Epoxy concrete, iron, bells and pendants 110 x 5 x 5 cm