Paolo Ventura – Il teatro della vita.
12 May 2025 – Time to read: 5 min
Paolo Ventura - Il teatro della vita
From May 15 to July 25, 2025, at MARCOROSSI artecontemporanea galleries
MARCOROSSI artecontemporanea presents a multi-site exhibition across its galleries in Milan, Turin, and Verona, featuring recent works by Paolo Ventura, where photographic storytelling meets scenographic construction. Three cities, three cycles, one poetic vision of time, memory, and identity are the central themes of this new solo exhibition by Paolo Ventura, one of the most internationally acclaimed Italian visual artists. The exhibition project, structured across the three locations (Milan, Turin, Verona), offers a coherent and immersive narrative, divided into three recent cycles created between 2024 and 2025, distinct yet united by a strong poetic continuity.
À bas Guillaume!: memory, poetry, and identity
The cycle À bas Guillaume! (2024) draws inspiration from the poignant tale in which Giuseppe Ungaretti recalls his friend Guillaume Apollinaire, who died at the end of World War I. Ventura does not merely illustrate: he interprets. Each image is a theatrical self-portrait set in an evoked and reinvented Paris, rich in historical and literary references. It is both an intimate homage and a reflection on the persistence of words and memory, even beyond loss.
Urban Landscapes: space as metaphor
In the cycle Urban Landscapes (2024–2025), the artist engages with bare, metaphysical environments dominated by sharp geometries and deep perspectives. These are not real spaces, but internal, mental ones. The human figure—often Ventura himself—is marginal, absorbed into the architectural context, like a silent shadow between dream and reality. These works mark a shift toward a more abstract narrative, in which space becomes a psychological protagonist.
Der Sturm: symbolic figures in a theatrical space
At the heart of the exhibition is the cycle Der Sturm (2025), presented to the public for the first time as a preview at the Turin photography fair The Phair. Ventura steps away from the scene and becomes the invisible director of a suspended universe populated by puppets inhabiting essential architectures and strict perspectives. The title—a reference both to the “storm” and the namesake German expressionist magazine—evokes theatrical drama and the legacy of 20th-century visual language. The images, dense and silent, question the viewer on universal themes: the mask, identity, and the role of the individual within the collective space.
A journey through visual storytelling
The theater of life is a journey. Each work is a scene that raises questions, never closing meanings. Ventura challenges presence, language, and image with a lucid and poetic gaze. Through the lens of theater, painting, and photography, the artist constructs worlds that speak of us, our time, and our fragility. An exhibition that invites us to pause, to look within the images, within time, within ourselves.
Info:
May 15 – July 25, 2025, Milan – Corso Venezia 29
May 17 – July 25, 2025, Verona – Via Garibaldi 18a
May 22 – July 25, 2025, Turin – Via della Rocca 36
Press office: Cristina Ghisolfi cristinaghisolfi@marcorossiartecontemporanea.com
Visit the profile of the artists in the exhibition:
