Finissage
Friday, June 20th, 2025 – 4 PM to 9 PM
The gallery will also be open on Saturday, June 21st, from 1 PM to 7 PM
Curated by Claudia Ponzi
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Critical text by Luca Pietro Nicoletti
I GIARDINI DELLA PITTURA (Paiting Gardens)
Among the possible ways of evoking images, one unites the research of Debora Fella and Mariangela Zabatino, focusing on the sedimentation of traces: fragments of reality deposited in memory and returned transfigured in painting. Their possible existence is entirely internal to the visual dimension of the pictorial medium, as a true immersion in a dreamy and vegetal imaginary that finds its reason to exist in and for painting.
This approach closely links their artistic practice to writing: the drawing of signs, whose arrangement on the canvas builds a meaningful discourse—whether verbal and linear, or a more or less intricate tangle from which the shape of an object emerges. The crux lies in the ambiguous status that this depiction assumes for itself, a quality typical of visual narration in general, and particularly where the process remains visible: is it a figure caught on the verge of materializing into a definitive focus that gives it tactile consistency, or is it rather a moment before its final dissolution?
The latter interpretation might be preferred, or at least suggests a broader reflection on the artistic context in which these two artists were trained and their long-standing affinities with proponents of Milanese aniconic research of the 1970s and 1980s. From the teachings of a great master like Mario Raciti to those of Italo Bressan, without overlooking the critical influence of Claudio Cerritelli, who played a significant role in shaping a certain abstract vocation in painting.
Indeed, it is within Cerritelli’s interpretative framework that one finds a key to reading the parallel paths of these two artists: an understanding of painting learned through its making, which suggests a continuous becoming of form. Or, in an expression dear to Raciti, it is the “making discovered,” which leaves visible the layering of operations and work phases that constitute the finished piece.
A reality therefore fading, caught on the edge of disappearance, sublimating into a transcendent dimension—burned by light or embraced by shadow—but always carrying the sense of a momentary passage through the field of existence.
On the side of the shadow
One of the recurring themes in Debora Fella’s work is rêverie: an allusion to the mechanisms of memory as an existential moment, and as a guiding motif that frames a search for fading—or perhaps better, an emergence from flashes, obscurities, and unfathomable darkness. The initial focus, fundamentally, lies in the very sign with which the artist traces her small, delicate images—in a “camera” dimension as taught by Paul Klee—using a technique of indirect transfer: drawing through the mediation of a sheet coated with lithographic ink, like a monotype, relinquishing the usual bond between sign and writing. By tracing on an inked sheet that impresses a pressure onto the final surface, Debora embraces the slowness of the work and the gradual emergence of the image itself.
It might be tempting to read certain images through the lens of engraving, and although this is not an activity the artist practices, she seems to think as if engraving were her primary craft. The line’s consistency becomes impalpable, as if formed autonomously, without a human hand. Furthermore, Debora mainly works subtractively, using sandpaper on paper or a cloth soaked in oil and pigment on canvas, veiling and erasing forms until immersing them in a shimmering atmosphere. This atmosphere invites exploration touch by touch, revealing the optical and tonal vibration of grays, sometimes scattered with color notations.
The memorial dimension of these images is also expressed in the choice of graphite gray or anthracite as the background color, differing notably when the natural color of the paper is left exposed. Not by chance, in 2020 Italo Bressan—under whom Debora trained—spoke of an “apotheosis of loneliness” in her work, emphasizing the intimate nature of her research: a “black” oeuvre that identified the meaning of her existence within shadow. The artist herself stated that the small scale helps her “concentrate the images and establish an intimate and focused relationship with them.” This choice, as Ruggero Savinio might have said, is “on the side of the shadow.”
It is precisely here that her detailed landscapes unfold, but above all, the repertoire of plant specimens inspired by the herbarium of Libereso, explicitly referenced in some titles but structurally informing the concept of these images: a paratactic review of fragments taken from reality and suspended on the page. Yet, viewed one after the other, Debora Fella’s sheets do not give the impression of a taxonomic catalog. Leaves, flowers, and stems emerge as emblems from unfathomable depths, like figures in an imaginary, symbolist dreamland. The small detail becomes an icon but does not conceal a fragile or transient nature: it advances toward the viewer from incalculable depths, firm and clear in contour until it becomes a linear motif on the surface, as if flattened between the pages of a treatise.
That white field—traditionally surrounding scientific illustrations—is here filled with atmosphere. It is her eye resting on the humblest vegetation, telling its story with elegance without diminishing the original fragility swallowed by shadow, like the last hours of the day, the sunset, just before nightfall.
Tales of signs
The sign that crosses the field of composition as a long stride is one of the most effective means to introduce into the forms of abstract painting a narrative element: it is not only the recording of an emotional moment that translates into painting, but a route that winds from one side to the other of the compositional field creating a network of relationships, bringing the eye to follow the movements made by the hand. It takes a simple and concentrated gesture, in some respects from Zen calligraphy, to approach without uncertainties to the support and imprint a track without hesitation, knowing well that a minimal choice like that made by Mariangela Zabatino admits no regrets, or corrections, except to compromise the freshness and control of natural irregularities of the matter: to be able to read in the random arrangement of the spots, in short, the outline of the natural forms, and suggest their slow metamorphosis before the eyes of the observer.
The immediacy of the path, moreover, does not always correspond to an action that is consumed in a short time, indeed it is not uncommon that between a draft and the following passes a longer time of decantation, necessary to bring into the consciousness the image that will then give completeness to the first trajectories. The work of Mariangela Zabatino rests entirely on this assumption: starting from a sign or, better still, from a real gestural itinerary, leaving that in the course of the process an image is revealed. This does not mean, of course, an unreserved abandonment to randomness, but knowing the coordinates of their movements and the forms contained in them, from the blot to the long stride with outstretched arm, to the minute rotation of the wrist that, depending on the media used, It produces thicker tangles which organize the field of tensions. In essence, Mariangela proceeds by sum of elementary gestures, which preserve all their original spontaneity of the imprint at first, leaving an emerging trace, with a deep memory of nature that can become landscape or herbarium depending on the case, But always in a diaphanous and sunny dimension. It is here that the minute nature, protagonist of many works, takes on a dynamic aspect, almost manifesting itself in a vibration of the sign and of matter, between centrifugal movements and slow dilatations.
In 2022, Claudio Cerritelli spoke of an «aromatic seduction» in his Adonis’ Gardens, the title of the exhibition at the Studio Masiero in Milan, which may have been copied from a book by Marcel Detienne. «A balm», continued the critic, «to attenuate the shadows of the unconscious». The crucial point, according to him, was in fact the suspension of the sign. On this instinctual basis, the images are then materialized, always frontal, suggesting motions of expansion or relationships between floating organisms, between points of thickening of matter, sometimes made more tactile by the use of chromatic notations and oil pigments, and aircraft flying through space as dynamic indications. In fact, what gives a compact look to the research is the relationship between the trace and the white of the backgrounds, as if the fading of the image took place due to a luminous sublimation.
Milan, 5th May 2025
From Tuesday to Saturday 13 – 19
Art Gallery Finestreria
Via Ascanio Sforza 69, 20141 Milano
