Discussions about painting reproduce the same limits that define them, the inside and outside of the work. And the first is the very delimitation of the question. The works presented at the MAAB gallery in Milan pose the question of the possible relationships between contemporary painting and the world, but also between painting and various contemporary art languages. And so, just as Vito Acconci when making certain videos and performances was inspired by film noir for the 1950s and 1960s, so painting today, like that of yesterday, investigates other disciplinary areas in order to construct strategies, situations, or simply images that belong to the artist’s double impulse, as Baudrillard says, to the annihilation and cancellation of all traces of the world and of resistance to such annihilating forces.

Freely inspired by Bruno Latour’s book of the same name, this show, curated by Massimiliano Scuderi, is an attempt to relate together the interests of five international artists who have dealt with the theme of a possible harmonious relationship between humanity and nature, between a utopian vision and a project proposal.

Mario Giacomelli (Senigallia, 1925-2000) devoted himself to photography from 1953 onwards, after having worked as a printmaker and having developed a sensitivity that was never to leave him. In 1955 he gained his first accolades for his series of photos and his first publications.

The show presents a series of works on canvas and paper by this artist – born in Abbiategrasso, Lombardy, in 1903 – which allow an overview of his art from the first figurative works (il campo, 1928) to the geometrical-abstract results of his output from the end of the 1950s to 1978 (Progressioni parallele in viola, 1960)the year of his death in Vacciago, the town that is today the venue of the Antonio and Carmela Calderara Foundation’s museum and archive.