Contemporary figurative painting: here's the On the Wall exhibition in Milan

The BUILDING space in Milan presents, from Thursday, January 20 to Saturday, March 19, 2022, the exhibition On the Wall, curated by Demetrio Paparoni with works by Paola Angelini, Rafael Megall, Justin Mortimer, Nicola Samorì, Vibeke Slyngstad, and Ruprecht von Kaufmann. The exhibition project, which includes more than forty works by contemporary artists who use figurative painting in profoundly different ways, was specially designed for BUILDING’s four floors. The works, created for this exhibition or never exhibited before in Italy, are largely large-scale.

The title of the exhibition is intended to open up different meanings. While on the one hand it suggests that this is an exhibition of paintings, on the other it recalls the concept of the wall as an element of division between two adjacent spaces or as a boundary to be overcome. Referring to the Renaissance concept that sees the painting as a window open to the outside world, the curator identifies in it a poetic detonator capable of opening gateways to the outside world, but also to an intimate or virtual dimension. If it is a door of access or escape, what allows its crossing is the ability to relate to the meaning embodied in the work.

In Demetrio Paparoni’s conception, an exhibition is an attempt to give order to the chaos of contemporary languages, an attempt rendered futile by the multiplicity of artistic phenomena. Governing chaos, the critic explains in commenting on the choices that accompany this exhibition, is one of the goals of science to understand in advance something that has not yet happened. Since chaos is the result of randomness determined by forces outside our control, it will still be ungovernable. Extending this reflection to the realm of artistic languages, the way they originate, develop and interact creates a fluid condition that makes any attempt to focus on the complexity of different phenomena subjective. Although each exhibition arises from an attempt to orient itself in the pluralism of languages, to provide a compass that allows one to find a way out of the labyrinth, even in its best-studied forms, it will still result in the staging of a failure.

Indeed, according to Paparoni, the curator’s perspective cannot give rise to an unambiguous reading of a fluid phenomenon such as art . This difficulty can be found as much in putting together works by different authors within the same exhibition, as is the case with On the Wall at BUILDING, as in dealing with the work of a single artist in its unpredictable formal, linguistic and conceptual variations. As much then as the medium used by the artists in this group show is painting, On the Wall aims to make evident a strong diversification of the languages and intents of the artists in the exhibition.

In On the Wall, the curator has circumscribed his choice exclusively to the realm of figurative painting, unlike the exhibition Contemporary Chaos, curated in 2018 at Vestfossen Kunstmuseum(Norway), or even in other exhibitions, in which the critic had given a plastic representation of the chaos of contemporary languages, putting artists who use different means of expression in dialogue. The project at BUILDING is also proposed as a continuation of the reflection begun with the exhibition The New Frontiers of Painting (2018), and continued with The Last Supper after Leonardo (2019), as part of the celebrations of the centenary of Leonardo’s death, both held at the Fondazione Stelline in Milan.

For all information, you can visit the official BUILDING website.

Pictured: Rafael Megall, Are there Mangy Cats (2020; oil on canvas, 250x480 cm)

Contemporary figurative painting: here's the On the Wall exhibition in Milan

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