PULVIS ET UMBRA SUMUS

Alessio BARCHITTA | Debora FELLA | Paolo MIGLIAZZA | Miriam MONTANI MAGRELLI | Luca PIANELLA

OPENING 
June 26, from 6 to 9 PM
Via Gorani 8, Milan 

In the presence of the artists

Galleria Allegra Ravizza is pleased to present the exhibition Pulvis et Umbra Sumus, a group exhibition of young artists who have distinguished themselves for their art and creativity in the San Fedele Visual Arts Prizein Milan: Alessio Barchitta (1991), Debora Fella (1990), Paolo Migliazza(1988), Miriam Montani Magrelli (1986) and Luca Pianella (1985).
Hosted in the Milan space, at Via Gorani 8, the group exhibition will open on Thursday June 26 from 6 PM to 9 PM, in the presence of the artists, and will remain open to the public until October 3, 2025.

The title of the exhibition Pulvis et Umbra Sumus references a verse from the Odesby the famous Roman poet Horace, which can be translated as “we are dust and shadow,” emphasizing the elusive and intangible nature of human existence, eternally subjected to the fleeting nature of time. According to the poet, the looming presence of death and the inescapable mortal nature of humanity should serve as a reminder to enjoy and savor every joyful moment of the present. Carpe diem!

The exhibition features thirty works that explore this theme both materially and conceptually: through diverse and multifaceted uses of dust, ash, plaster, or graphite, ach work delves into and reveals the decline and dissolution of being alongside the blurring of memory, the evanescence of light, and the inevitable—and sometimes catastrophic—passage of time.

As evidence of this, Alessio Barchitta presents a work from the Coordinate project (2017): layers of silicone capturing fragments of plaster and paint collected from the walls of abandoned homes built in Sicily, his native land, between the 19th and 20th centuries. These ruined buildings, aged and already lived in, now only reveal their history—marked by the comings and goings of inhabitants and guests who, according to their tastes, turned those walls into a home: from Art Nouveau decorations to the increasingly flat and-perhaps- indifferent plaster of the last tenants. Each piece tells a different story, revealing a growing neglect of domestic spaces and a shift towards an era of fast mobility, temporary housing, anonymous spaces, and unstable situations. This layering of silicone, paint, and plaster, spread like a cloth drying in the sun, includes geographic coordinates that aim to recall places of origin and the awareness of a past that no longer exists.

The domestic sphere is also evoked in the works of Miriam Montani Magrelli, who during the lockdown created the piece Habitat, Dentro come Fuori—a reproduction of details from the interior walls of her home in Milan, made using the fine dust of the city. From December 2019, she began collecting this “skin” of her space by scraping and vacuuming the surfaces with a small handheld vacuum cleaner, not without difficulty. The bathroom and kitchen tiles, decorative plates and Venetian plasters from her room become the main protagonists, creating a dialogue between interior and exterior that captures the alienation of everyday life and domestic spaces. Precisely at a time when human power attempts to exert control over life, fine dust—waste product of capitalism—represents the unpredictable. Her artistic practice, multifaceted and polymorphous, consistently refers not to the visible image but to the one that unfolds in a dreamlike or imagined vision, or that emerges from traces and signs of occurrence—manifesting through the use of fragile and ephemeral materials like dust or organic elements. From this research comes the 2020 series Inversioni di Volo, in which the artist, after compiling an inventory of Milan’s dust, symbolically inverts the weight of the city: everything that gravitates toward the ground acquires an aerial and volatile nature. Heavy objects—such as stones, asphalt droplets, or items—dematerialize, leaving only outlines that are transferred to paper using the very substance that, by nature, floats in the air, moved by the slightest breeze: dust. In this way, the artist transmutes a solid body into an immaterial, weightless one, inverting its trajectory in an upside-down vision of the world.

Debora Fella’s artistic research also draws from a dreamlike and imaginary world where subjects are reduced to shadows and transparencies. Working in the negative, she offers the viewer a reversed, mirrored vision of reality. The main subject of her work is the shadow, depicted on paper and canvas surfaces of small scale, reflecting the intimate and collected dimension of her practice. Placing a sheet over a layer of lithographic ink, the artist draws still lifes, flowers, objects, and figures using pencils and pastels of various sizes and colors. Once complete, she flips the sheet: what was once the back becomes the front, the artwork itself—shifting the focus from the physical form to its impalpable shadow. The resulting monochrome drawing is simple in its essentiality, free of chromatic distractions, sometimes sharper, sometimes more elusive, much like memories and the workings of recollection. The volatility of memory—its light, ephemeral, and intangible nature—is materialized through the use of slate dust, graphite, and charcoal, which she applies by alternating filled and empty spaces, sharp lines and faded strokes, always balancing abstraction and figuration, dream and reality.

A stark contrast between light and shadow also emerges in the work of Luca Pianella, who is simultaneous attentive to the fusion of these two luminous conditions, stripping each of their specificity in a dialogue of contrast. In his series Ombre(Shadows), Pianella explores this luminous polarization where figures appear to emerge from the deep darkness that engulfs them. The subjects’ faint outlines are made visible only thanks to the surrounding excess of darkness, giving them form by contrast. To achieve this darkness, the artist uses only graphite, which is then worked through a process of “subtraction” with the intent of bringing back the whiteness of the paper. This technique outlines shapes of human faces and still lifes in an elegant play of apparent three-dimensionality, where time seems to remain suspended, motionless.

To a lost time, understood as a return to point zero, Paolo Migliazza instead refers with his figures of young adolescents who, with veiled eyes and lacking any individual connotation, perceive and suffer the weight of the real world, the one far from childish imagination. Perhaps building themselves up or perhaps disintegrating in the mixture of the material that composes them, like coal dust, earth, or chalk, the busts of the young bodies rise in their essential simplicity before the viewer who can choose whether to question the work or to be questioned by it. Paolo Migliazza presents irresolute bodies, in metamorphosis, reflecting an age of tension in which identity is still in the process of definition, in which vitality and volatility coexist in an imperfect dualism. 

Special thanks to Andrea Dall’Asta SJ and the San Fedele Gallery of Milan.