Marking the thirtieth year since the gallery’s founding, and after twenty-eight years of their collaboration, Raffaella Cortese presents a new solo exhibition by Marcello Maloberti. Conceived for the gallery’s three exhibition spaces on Via Stradella and its venue in Albisola, the exhibition marks the threshold of a new phase in the artist’s practice – a moment of stripping away and returning to the essential, following his most extensive retrospective at Milan’s Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in 2024.
INCIPIT in Via Stradella provides an encounter with emptiness. It rejects linear narrative in favor of a logic of dispersal and subtraction. As art increasingly tends toward forms of direct communication, Maloberti shifts course, introducing a silence that opens up a field of attentive listening, echo, and resonance.
As with La conversione di San Paolo in Albisola, this work revolves around the themes of fall and renewal, exploring divine light as both a moment of trauma and revelation. The reference to Caravaggio doesn’t appear as a straightforward iconographic citation, but operates on a deeper, structural level: the scene is emptied, letting the sacred emerge through its active tension.
In Milan, in each of the three environments, a single brass plaque – echoing the baroque shapes of the stations along the Way of the Cross – is engraved with an original phrase from the Martellate series. The phrase, which is the same in every location, does not multiply, but rather it insists. The work remains unchanged; what shifts is the gaze, guiding the visitor-performer through the stations of a non-linear Via Crucis without destination.
INCIPIT offers a space to inhabit: emptiness as a critical stance, repetition as a form of resistance, and rarefaction as a way to deepen experience. Maloberti doesn’t offer images to interpret or messages to absorb; instead, he shines a light on absence and void through a work that balances the weight of things with the possibility of their disappearance.
In this sense, INCIPIT does not simply reveal itself, but must be experienced – like a street or a narrow alley in a mountain village. It is a poetic statement that also bears a sense of urgency: now more than ever, exhibiting means opening, not explaining. This is not an exhibition that teaches, but one that questions, like a weary oracle or a mantra aiming to etch itself onto the very surface of the city through its audience, which serves as its conduit.
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