Cortesi Gallery is pleased to present Suoerfici in Equilibrio (Surfaces in Balance), a group exhibition opening on 20 September 2025 at its Lugano venue. The exhibition will bring together a significant group of Italian artists active from the 1960s to the present day.
The show stems from a simple yet significant intuition: the surface—not as a passive envelope but as an active field of forces, a threshold between matter and vision, between form and space—is one of the most fertile territories in artistic research from the late 20th century to contemporary times. Surfaces in Balance explores this field of tension, questioning the surface as structure, rhythm, memory, and latent energy.
On display are works by Agostino Bonalumi, Pietro Consagra, Piero Dorazio, Gianfranco Pardi, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Salvatore Scarpitta, Giuseppe Santomaso, Paolo Scheggi, and – as a natural extension into the present – Maurizio Donzelli, Chiara Dynys, and Tiziana Lorenzelli, outlining a conceptual map that is not linear but dialogic, transcending historical or stylistic categories to reveal a shared field of exploration: the surface as a dynamic threshold, where gaze and matter engage.
All the artists in the exhibition contribute to this reflection through different approaches.
Bonalumi treats the canvas as a plastic and structural space, where the surface is deformed by underlying forces, generating a continuous perceptual vibration. Consagra reformulates the relationship between sculpture and architecture, reducing form to essential and rhythmic elements that inhabit space as rhythmic presences, bringing sculpture to the threshold of painting.
Pomodoro works the surface as a site of incision, stratification, and symbolism: his engraved and marked works evoke ancient scripts and cosmic tensions, transforming bronze into a mental landscape. Scarpitta, on the other hand, focuses on constrictive gestures: his bandages and material tensions turn the surface into a living, wounded, and sutured skin, where form emerges from restrained energy.
Scheggi opens the surface, turning it into an optical and mental device: his layered modules activate the space between planes, inviting the gaze to move through the intervals. Through fluid weaves and radial colour fields, Dorazio creates surfaces that evoke waves, vibrations, and infinite movements – a painting that celebrates the expansion and continuity of rhythm, transcending the static nature of closed form.
Santomaso renders the surface a poetic and atmospheric site: his light, layered fields are sensitive membranes between the visible and the intuitive, between gesture and breath. Pardi introduces architectural structure as a compositional framework: his grids, overlays, and painted constructions give the surface a constructive and rational identity, though never rigid.
This dialogue extends into the contemporary with Maurizio Donzelli, Chiara Dynys, and Tiziana Lorenzelli – artists from later generations who share a common interest in perception, transformation, and the ambiguity of the visible. Donzelli works with reversible, fluid, ever-moving surfaces that challenge the notion of a fixed image. Dynys explores transparent, reflective, luminous materials, creating works that are perceptual thresholds, spaces of passage and refraction. Lorenzelli, with her sculpture Orbita, embodies both a material and conceptual return to the past and a testimony of its evolution, but also a deep continuity: the surface becomes an architectural body, a suspended balance between memory and future.
Surfaces in Balance thus takes the form of a choral exhibition, where each work contributes to a shared reflection on the nature of the surface, understood as an interface between interior and exterior, between object and viewer, between gesture and architecture. It does not propose a historicist reading, but a living and articulated genealogy capable of crossing generations and finding a shared ground of research, tension, and poetics on the surface.
The exhibition is, therefore, also an invitation to observe the present with broader eyes and to question the artworks as active presences in space, as unstable balances between order and disorder, between density and lightness. At a time when perception is constantly stimulated and fragmented, these works offer us the time needed to look, pause, and reflect.