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Spotlight on Gian Maria Tosatti’s new environmental installation ‘Paradiso’

In this business of getting killed, you have to pretend,
you mustn’t be difficult, you have to pretend that life goes on, that’s the hard part, this lie.
Louis Ferdinand Celine
Journey to the End of the Night, p. 36

“Et absterget omnem lacrimam ab oculis eorum, et mors ultra non erit, neque luctus neque clamor neque dolor erit ultra” is one of the golden mottos inscribed by the artist on a wall in the monumental work Paradiso, on display until April 11 in Milan. A work that revitalises and masterfully employs the concept of site-specific within the ex Magazzini Raccordati, at Via Ferrante Aporti 15. This article is a deeply personal journey, traveling between Paradiso at the former warehouses of the Central Station and the minimal chic of the Lia Rumma Gallery on Via Stilicone 19. A journey to relieve the overwhelming visual flow of a capitalism that has been “left without an enemy” (Jager 2024) and to once again see handmade works. Artifacts. The sensitive machine and aesthetic action of Gian Maria Tosatti unfold along two vital axes of the Milanese metropolis: Es brent!, an institutional exhibition in his gallery at Via Stilicone 19, and Paradiso at Central Station, housed in Via Ferrante Aporti (now controlled by Eco Design + Brembo).

The Project

As always, a cosmogony confirming a clear vision: post-democracy is real, and Italians, disengaged neo-fascists, couldn’t care less. They empty our hearts, wounding us—us, who instead love people, painting, the light inside churches. The tracks of the Shoah memorial, the industrial destruction of the soul, and the systematic incineration of Otherness lie beneath our feet. A prayer recited by Ovadia fills the space. Paradiso carries a theatrical and monumental echo. For the lucky few, like the author of this piece, who have also visited the Ex Magazzini Generali of the Port of Naples and 3_Lucifero in 2015, the connection is an inevitable jolt—like missing that olive tree, that little stove, every time a ship docks in Naples. The Roman artist crafts a poetic and evocative matryoshka in Es brent!, which then finds its monumental dignity in the Platonic cavity of Central Station. A literal evocation of the contemporary stripped bare, of reducing every poetic breath to a showcase and a consumed bone. Friction and resistance—paradox takes on flesh in this project. The city of Milan hosts this work, frightened and disoriented. A project occupying two places in a major hub of consumerism and stress. My hometown, from which I fled after the downfall of the No Expo movement, now prey to unbridled dehumanisation. A little Catholic New York that continues to expel the poor and marginalise suffering. A city without real social mixing. And Tosatti, as an outsider, pierces through it.

“A literal evocation of the contemporary stripped bare, of reducing every poetic breath to a showcase and a consumed bone”

The Works

Both Es brent! (It burns!) and Paradiso manifest as two strangely calm aesthetic “lives,” the most mature and contemplative works in Tosatti’s entire trajectory—wholly Southern and political. A project to be savored at a slow pace. Alone. Like its artist, a lone wolf sitting within the catastrophe. The epic biennial and quadrennial refrain, after the peace marches to Assisi, presents a calm before the storm—before war spreads in the twilight of the 2020s. Tosatti is a seer, a contemporary augur who reads the entrails in this cycle of sculptures, pictorial elements, neon, flags, and vast, cold, shattered empty spaces. One walks among the fragments, the obsessions, and the oblivion of a country and a Europe that have forgotten Ventotene, the state massacres—or perhaps never even noticed them. Never heard Ilaria Alpi’s cry, never felt Enrico Baj’s desire, or the artistic fervor of Grotowski in Pontedera. Chandeliers lie on the ground, crumpled blankets, vital theater, and mold coexist with our hearts. A cycle of golden inscriptions, like a neo-church, floods the gaze, from damp lichens to life itself. The angels seem to have fled; marble tombstones are broken. The sculptural and environmental works are the entrails the artist reads—the dismembered viscera of History. Of the fragments of a thousand stories that demand touch and love, only to be impaled and pinned to the ground instead. Ovadia’s rhythmic voice—he, a regular at the communist restaurant Brutto Anatroccolo and ostracised by Milanese Zionists for his poetic choices—becomes a chant, a violence. A Lucifer. A prayer is always also a violence that restrains flesh from its will. It is a ritualistic repetition.

“A project to be savored at a slow pace. Alone. Like its artist, a lone wolf sitting within the catastrophe”

Entering five at a time from Via Ferrante Aporti, stepping into thousands of square meters, offers an indescribable pleasure, a voyeurism of dark tourism—for those of us who love Pasternak, hate Stalin, American imperialism, and the madness of informational dominance. It is a life without democracy but with the shudder of life within life, animating Es brent! through the refined, ethereal four floors of Lia Rumma’s spaces, opposite the former Fonderia Battaglia. Climbing, clinging to the screeching iron, to the walls of a Biennale, another grand event, another censored Quadriennale direction. Everything past. Everything was once joyous. Today, what remains are sculptures, forms, beauty, and doing one’s work with dignity: on the second floor of Lia Rumma, for instance, a cycle of iron paintings, infused with gold leaf, occupies an enormous wall over five meters high, nine meters long. For those privileged enough to have seen it come to life in the studio, it is an epiphany. It is the calm force of the Lombard plains descending—so frenetic, fascist, bourgeois, liberal, and full of oblivion. Leon Blanc and paradoxes recall this making and unmaking, like telescopes into the future. Rusted iron evokes the fascio, while gold recalls the Neapolitan Baroque’s power. This inserting and infiltrating the fissures—sculpture and modesty—are unique traits for an institutional artist. Es brent! reminds us that everything burns, like bodies consumed in Gaza, battered on all sides. But the genocidal force belongs to Gallant’s army. Sculpture, modesty, and love—dense, surging, made of a thousand dreams, impaled on the carcass of a Minotaur. It is gold leaf. It is layered, a scale of iron ennobled by a precious wooden shelf.

The six flags on the top floor, diaphanous, titled Fondamenta, wave to recall the opacity of power mechanisms. They provocatively stand high, fluttering in transparent plastic, reminiscent of a great installation by Wilfredo Prieto I saw as a child, Apolitico (2001), where the thirty flags of the UN’s dominant nations were bleached, neutralised. The powers that rule the world, however, are visible and dig into us: pills, anesthesia, submission, and the pleasure of it. The problem isn’t power but the lack of counter-powers, flailing in the dark, too afraid to act or lost in asterisks and political correctness, wrapped in bourgeois distractions. A frenzy of consumption and haste. The flags wave, the light flickers, the iron is streaked with gold, and the neon sculpture Traum/A gleams. Everything is perfect—but where has our heart gotten caught? The seven halls of the angelic hierarchies stand empty, inhabited only by homeless people wrapped in thermal blankets. Along the route, amid dirty latrines and puddles near heaps of snow, violence pervades everything. A marble wall inscribed with the names of angels lies shattered. Ultimately, beyond the deep emptiness of our hearts, Pasolini’s La Ricotta reminds us: “Ah, rags, why do you vote for the party that starves you? Eh, what do you want, it’s my vocation.” If emptiness is dangerous, it is also worth recalling that Zen masters have woven bows, arrows, and spiritual resilience from the breath of emptiness. Milan, between elite psychiatrists and Arab street gangs, unresolved conflicts, and the destitute huddled outside boutiques in San Babila, succumbs to this morphology of the South. In Tosatti’s work, even the city of the Madonnina still gets shaken up—every now and then.

‘Bandiere’ 2025, Photo by Marco Dapino
Gian Maria Tosatti Casa dell’anima #01, Mixed materials
Gian Maria Tosatti Fireworks #09 Ruggine su lamiera zincata 100,4 × 200,1 cm
Es brent! installation view

Atmosfere

Credits:

Artist :Gian Maria Tosatti / @gianmariatosatti_studio
‘Paradiso’ Venue: Ex-Magazzini Raccordati,  Milan
Produced by: Eco Contract / @ecocontract Eco Design Italia / @ecodesignitalia Brembo / @brembo
‘Es Brent!’ at Gallery: Lia Rumma Gallery / @liarummagallery
Words: G. Olmo Stuppia / @g_olmo_stuppia
Editor: Maria Abramenko  / @mariabramenko
Assistant: Annalisa Fabbrucci / @annalisa_fabbrucci

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