Starting May 13, ORMA Gallery in Milan will host, a completely unprecedented encounter between the latest sculptural production of Matteo Negri (Milan, 1982) and the paintings of Ian Salamente (Cabo Frio – Brazil, 1997), exhibited in Italy for the first time.
“Text me, when you get home”, the title of this dialogue, is the coded message of a culture of affection that crosses physical and political geographies, grafting itself—like a second skin—onto what could be described as an empirical “code of care” in relationships; not a narrative of farewells or abandonments, but rather of movements that encompass life experiences explored through intersecting layers: memory, cultural heritage, and everyday experience.
On display in ORMA’s spaces (via dei Bossi 2A) are Matteo Negri’s “Boe” (Buoys): a series of bronze sculptures built from precarious models of reality, replicated in the foundry according to physical principles suited to the existence of these simple objects: a heavier part to remain in the water; a lighter solution to float; an aerial element to be identifiable. Ephemeral structures that, in Negri’s series, become almost anti-monuments to the iconic act of navigating waters that are not always safe—much like the uncertain waters of life experience—yet which find, in the most classical and marvelous technique of casting, a new perspective: the need to pay tribute to a often-forgotten collective.
Inspired by the poetics of Hélio Oiticica, for whom the world was the museum and the experience of art was everyday life, Ian Salamente’s painting practice also develops through the representation of everyday fractures and tensions, predominantly urban.
By investigating the codes and metropolitan symbols that permeate Brazilian and Latin American culture in general, Ian Salamente presents a contemporary iconography of labor, displacement, the coexistence of multitudes within routine, and also moments of rest as states of surrender (and perhaps grace?) within the tireless pursuit of responsibilities in the quest for a “better life.”
