The exhibition can be thought of as a complex organism, a set of elements that collaborate to convey a thought of a different nature, whether critical, philosophical, or moral. When there are multiple points of view, in the case of collective exhibitions, it is obvious how, in order to convey a univocal message and one that is in harmony, a nucleus is needed around which the artists gravitate, like a vortex around its eye.

SAC presents the group exhibition Poli, collecting the works of 20 artists who during their career have exhibited at the Maelström Gallery at via Ciovasso 17 in Milan. The exhibition focuses on the memory of Luca Poli, a gallery owner and figure in contemporary art who conducted his work, together with Rita Marziani, trying to attract creators and consumers of contemporary art into his space, with the hope of transmitting the fascinating complexity that permeates it.

The gallery, named after the story entitled Descent into the Maelström by Edgar Allan Poe, has been able to demonstrate its hybrid and complex nature: never static or unilateral, it became a travelling project in 2012, expanding also at the service of Art Advisory, always keeping the cause of support for young artists and the expressive variety of their approaches close to its heart.
As with the Estro exhibition that inaugurated the gallery in 2010, Poli also aims to give voice to artists through their personal language without a particular common thread, but rather emphasising the variety of media and types of representation and proposing to the viewer a free path, inviting them to lose themselves once again in that Maelström of materials, shapes and dimensions, in balance between disorientation and charm.

The exhibition opens with sculpture: L’ordine delle cose (“The Order of Things“) is the work of Andrea Cereda, who narrates the geometric order behind our reality through his composition. The harmonic rule that binds the stone, anchored to the ground, to the metal forms on the wall that, similar to fragments of an aeroplane, dialogue with space with paradoxical lightness.
The installation Under Water by Alice Olimpia Attanasio includes two paintings and some sculptures that seek to reflect on the condition of fish, part of which is strongly at risk in our ecosystem, represented here outside its natural environment in ceramic figures oppressed by cement, decapitated or portrayed suffering on the canvas.
The work of Guido Airoldi concludes the sculptural section scattered through the exhibition. Lèmene reproduces in a mimetic way, through paper on canvas and board, the ammonitic stone used to enclose the land plots of Lessinia, weaving an analogical relationship between sculpture and territory.
Suddenly, the vortex leads from three-dimensional works to photography: Mise en abyme: la rovina nella rovina (“Mise en abyme: the ruin within the ruin“) by Nicola Bertellotti questions the “mise en abyme”, a narrative phenomenon of reduplication of the image that the artist uses to build a story about the ruin within the ruin, the worn fresco that reflects the crumbling space around it. Tommaso Fiscaletti also uses the photographic medium to tell the story of spaces from a perceptual point of view. Mute #11 transports the viewer from the visual to the auditory by portraying the dialogue between the carousel and the surrounding nature, a noisy and dynamic context that is stopped and “muted” through its image. The female figure is at the centre of Sara Giannatempo‘s work that exhibits the diptych Filles a parties, Filles d’amour, Filles en circulation from the series “Una Nuova Slavitù” (“A New Slavery“), a composition that with cinematographic language proposes a field and counter-field between the workers of a brothel and a prominent client with a covered face, in a sort of narrative tableau vivant of the 1930s.
Francesco Minucci reflects on the theme of the mask by presenting the series “Reality Show” in which several characters question the viewer on the sustainability of appearance in the eyes of society, expressly highlighting the function of the “monk’s robe”.
Vincenzo Todaro takes a further step from the photographic medium, with girl, child and doll from the “DSPR” series, which seems to evoke a residual image, the representation of a photograph in which the human form sublimates as eroded by time and by the painting that has left its indelible trace.
In the variety of pictorial approaches, there are some themes common to multiple artists. Nature, for example, is observed from multiple points of view in the works of Ilaria del Monte, Matteo Nannini and Gaia Lionello.
Ilaria del Monte in the three works La piccola camera fiamminga, Doppia Fuga (“The Little Flemish Chamber, Double Fugue“) and Risvegli (“Awakening“) depicts the almost symbiotic relationship between the body and Nature according to the transience that unites them, in a figurative and luminous representation enhanced with references to Christian symbolism and classical mythology.
Matteo Nannini in Riposo nel giardino dell’Eden e Adamo (“Rest in the Garden of Eden and Adam“) from the “Giardini” (“Gardens“) series paints an idyllic and flamboyant plant reality, a place far from the chaos of our urbanised world, where man can rediscover his most primal and naked sensations in contact with other species. Gaia Lionello, on the other hand, proposes a vision that is as raw as it is realistic. In Terre Sospese, (“Suspended Lands“), she represents glimpses of isolated Nature, far from coexisting with man, where a thin painted fog gives a glimpse of the wooden knots of the table. In Save the Tree, a human figure carries the last mast on his boat, as if to build a narrative link with those Suspended Lands in which not even isolated Nature has managed to save itself from its executioner,
now forced to redeem itself.
A critical position is also taken by Fabio Presti, who in the House on Mars series represents rigid buildings lowered into metaphysical and sandy spaces, evoking an extraterrestrial reality inhabited by man, the result of a climatic migration following the catastrophic end of our planet. With a more formal look, Tina Sgrò‘s work REPERTI (“FINDINGS“) proposes an urban glimpse in which a dusty light scratches the represented space, returning a worn image and the limits of figurativity, devoid of human presence. With Imparando a Volare (“Learning to Fly“) by Armando Fettolini, the artist offers the viewer his vision of lightness, far from the representation of a subject, the work appears as a surface in which the rippled matter seems to want to detach itself from the support.
Omar Canzi also uses a multi-material and informal approach. In UNTITLED, the artist seems to replicate the surface of a wall enhanced by torn posters and virulent marks of colour, framing a portion of urban reality. The second work, The Bluest Light, represents an abstract synthesis of Street Art aesthetics according to the artist’s personal point of view, which alludes to graffiti through the colour and the spontaneous speed of the pictorial gesture. Once again, through a hybrid language, Elena del Fabbro proposes a story that begins with the digital collages exhibited at the Maelström Gallery and ends with the analogical assembly of Punto di Dolore (“Pain Point“). It is a sort of material evolution that opens the viewer to the full interpretative potential, placing them in front of a dreamlike imaginary populated by distorted figures.
There is no shortage of artists with a strongly graphic taste. Erica Campanella in Sentimento e Verità (“Feeling and Truth“) represents the flower as the pure object of a lost beauty, portrayed through a nostalgic and evocative filter that seems to make it bloom and illuminate with its own light. Willow with Assolo and Jungle Floor explores a Neo-Pop aesthetic in dialogue with comics and design. Her compositions appear saturated and enamelled, interacting with the viewer’s gaze, leading it to bounce uninterruptedly from one side to the other, struck by a frenzy of colours. Arianna Piazza in her Senza Titolo (“Untitled“) offers an autobiographical study of the body that, deformed, gives rise to monstrous biological assemblies. The drawings were in fact made by the artist during a period of particular difficulty linked to her motherhood and seek to represent how inner discomfort can transform our outermost layer.

In its plurality of visions, Poli presents a condensed reality. A gathering of artists who, over the years, have built the exhibition narrative of the Maelström Gallery, gathered in a shared moment and in a common space to honour the memory of the one who in some way has allowed them to express themselves once again, Luca Poli.

Pietro Salvatore