Inside Who?

On the occasion of the Twenty-Second Giornata del Contemporaneo, promoted by AMACI, Fondazione De Chiara De Maio presents Inside Who?, a solo exhibition by Emiliano Aiello at MiartGallery, in Via Brera, Milan.
The exhibition stems from a question that runs through the artist’s most recent research: within whom does the entity we call the Self reside? Through a layered, tactile and strongly gestural approach to painting, Aiello explores the complexity of human identity and the conflict between opposing forces that coexist within the individual, symbolically associated with the realms of order and chaos.
Matter, colour and gesture become tools for making tensions, fragilities, desires and fears visible, allowing a state of continuous transformation to emerge on the painted surface. Conflict is not understood as something to be eliminated, but as a possibility for knowledge: a space in which the different parts of the self can recognise one another, confront one another and find a possible form of balance.
The artwork thus becomes a meeting place between the artist’s most intimate, emotional and irrational dimension and that of the viewer, who is invited not simply to look, but to recognise fragments of their own experience within the images.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a performance in which Emiliano Aiello will publicly retrace the process through which one of his paintings takes shape. Within a section of the gallery wall, marked out with adhesive tape and temporarily transformed into a painting surface, the artist will attempt to recreate the sense of isolation that normally accompanies his work in the studio.
Standing before the wall and seeking, ideally, to withdraw from the presence of the audience, Aiello will begin to pursue his inner images through mark and colour. The work will develop through successive layers, additions, erasures and removals of material, according to a process in which form is not determined in advance, but gradually sought out.
The necessarily limited duration of the performance will most likely allow the audience to witness only the emergence of the work’s initial structure, making visible a stage of the artist’s practice that normally remains private: the moment in which the image appears, disappears, is corrected and sought once again. The performance therefore does not become the spectacular creation of a painting before an audience, but rather the exposure of the very process of painting itself, understood as a search for the essence of the image through layering.
Inside Who? marks the first appointment of Fuori seDE, a project by Fondazione De Chiara De Maio conceived to extend its activities beyond its own exhibition spaces, creating new opportunities for encounters between artists, places, audiences and territories.