Casa Portaluppi

1. 01

   Mirko Pagliacci

   Untitled, 2008 · Untitled, 2008

   Mixed media: photographic print with oil painting interventions

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   Trained between Rome and Switzerland, in the 1990s Mirko Pagliacci (Lausanne, 1959) worked at length with Mario Schifano, becoming his assistant. His own language is built on layers of photographs, painted interventions and glazes that turn everyday images into fragments of memory suspended between reality and abstraction.

   In the first work, a tropical landscape is reworked with glazes of colour that evoke sand dunes: the real place becomes a vision suspended between memory, perception and imagination. In the second, the photographic reproduction of an ancient Roman fresco is altered by painted interventions recalling a film frame: a temporal short circuit between archaeology and contemporary art.

2. 02

   Daniele Giunta

   Regno Iperboreo, 2007

   Ink on silk

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   Daniele Giunta (Palermo, 1974) is an Italian artist whose work moves between photography, painting and experimentation with materials, favouring suspended atmospheres in which the landscape becomes a mental space.

   Regno Iperboreo evokes the myth of Hyperborea, the legendary land at the edge of the known world. The ink, absorbed by the weave of the silk, dissolves the outlines of the image and creates a rarefied landscape in which trees and vegetation emerge as evanescent presences immersed in a milky light.

3. 03

   LOLO

   Untitled, 2006 · Untitled, 2006

   Indian ink and pencil drawing on paper

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   The artist LOLO belongs to a generation of authors whose work is built on the mark and on the construction of mental landscapes, with a meticulous handwriting achieved through the obsessive repetition of the line.

   In these two small works the landscape is concentrated inside a circle, as if observed through a lens or enclosed in a memory. The contrast between the density of the line and the wide white surface gives the image a contemplative character; the very small scale invites close observation, turning the drawing into a small universe to be explored slowly.

4. 04

   Maurizio Galimberti

   Untitled, n.d.

   Polaroid

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   Maurizio Galimberti (Como, 1956) is one of the best-known contemporary Italian photographers, famous for his use of instant Polaroid photography, turned from a means of immediate reproduction into a tool of artistic research.

   In this snapshot the very qualities of the emulsion — softness of the image, a slight loss of definition, colour casts — turn the photograph into an almost painterly surface. The overlapping light and the faint blur dissolve descriptive precision in favour of a more evocative perception.

5. 05

   Sandro Martini

   Quantità URUTU, 1995

   Mixed media on canvas

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   Sandro Martini (Livorno, 1941 – Milan, 2022) was one of the freest and most lyrical figures of Italian abstraction in the second half of the twentieth century. At the core of his work lies the idea that painting should not merely decorate a surface, but become total space, architecture and breath — as in his celebrated environmental installations in Italy and the United States.

   Quantità URUTU unhinges the two-dimensionality of the canvas and turns it into a three-dimensional, vibrating space. “Quantità” is not to be understood mathematically, but as an accumulation of chromatic energy, material thickness and visual memories; the word “URUTU” acts as a poetic magnet, evoking a primitive nature charged with underground tension.

The works belong to the private collection living in the apartment.