The exhibition arises from the interplay between two antithetical methods of making: veiling and unveiling, redundancy and essentiality—extreme yet connected boundaries that demand a reading in two paradoxically univocal directions.

Valerio Ambiveri uses painting as a craft to be fully reclaimed.

Luigi Compagnoni, through his sculptures, alludes to the tools of painting: small white canvases, brushes, juxtaposed with playful arrangements of wooden forms and metal elements—the irony of the world. What unites them is a shared nostalgia for an open-ended time, a becoming marked by the imprint of the past.

However, this is not the romantic dream of beauty as a promise of happiness or utopia of reconciliation, but rather a dream that lives in time and shares its variability. And it is precisely time—the elusive—that enters their forms through traces and fragments, tracing back to an original making: not innocent or immediate, but encoded, inscribed, and ordered within a poetics full of craftsmanship as knowledge of tradition.

To bring time into play—its action—and to recover that distance, that absence, starting from one’s own historical age: this is the essence of Valerio Ambiveri’s painting, a meticulous and slow journey into the fifteenth-century craftsmanship of altarpieces. His lengthy preparatory work is a manifesto of duration.

Luigi Compagnoni’s works, exquisitely delicate in their unusual juxtapositions of different materials, evoke the infancy of the world, its mutability, its flow. Tracing the mystery of origins becomes possible only by following the deep and temporal pathways of memory.

Thus, found objects and invented forms relive the corrosion of time, the absence, the non-being—transforming into vital resources for the work of art. These works guide us toward a strategy of looking: not a linear position, but an infinite testimony of memory as it returns through the voids opened by time—an initiatory journey into the desire for painting.