Marta Ravasi HEI-HO

Acappella is delighted to announce “Hei-ho”, Marta Ravasi’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.
The Italian artist (born in Merate in 1987; lives and works in Milan) presents a new body of work dedicated to the still life, continuing the dialogue initiated in Naples with “Bucce” in 2023, her first exhibition at the gallery.
The progressive and dynamic development of this subject confirms it as the protagonist of Ravasi’s inquiry, serving as a pretext to expand her formal research into painting.
The works – small-scale oils on canvas – bear witness in this recent production to the consolidation of the artist’s poetics. Revolving around these subjects, which are treated as mere expedients, the research moves towards an increasingly visceral, yet simultaneously atmospheric, definition of the pictorial matter on canvas.
The pictorial variety of textures and colours is defined through a paradox: whilst dimensions, materials, and subjects remain unchanged and constant—restricting the scope to compositions of generic spherical fruit—the formal variety expands. The range of action is thus dense with possibilities: surfaces are refined or thickened in specific areas of the canvas, whilst the compositions find new geometries and the choice of palette is enriched. This spectrum of possibilities opened up by
Ravasi has well-defined boundaries, yet it seems to develop within the very depth of the painting and its structural characteristics.
Experimentation thus unfolds across canvases that are primarily horizontal in format, where geometry takes centre stage. The focus is generally decentred, and the viewer’s gaze navigates the surfaces through different impastos and brushstrokes, which manage the colour on the canvas in ever-new ways—with strokes that are at times more frenetic, and at others more composed and controlled.
In this scenario, the fruit is emptied of its literal image and reconstructed through abstract and atmospheric volumes. These transform it into ellipses and eclipses, where full and empty spaces are rendered entirely anew in composite pinks and oranges.
Hei-ho is an onomatopoeic interjection that directs the viewer’s attention towards a less rational vision of daily life. It acts as an awakening and a call to the materiality of painting itself and, consequently, to the construction of the picture, returning once more to the subject and to an active gaze upon these everyday, universal presences.