Es brent!

Artists

Gian Maria Tosatti

Press release

Gian Maria Tosatti returns to Milan, two years after his solo show at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, with an intervention on the difficult present, articulated in two exhibitions that reflect each other. On the one hand, Es brent! the first solo exhibition at the Lia Rumma Gallery in Milan; on the other hand, Paradiso, a site-specific installation with a strong symbolic approach, conceived for the former Magazzini Raccordati of Milan's Central Station - buildings under the constraint of the Sovrintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio - and produced by Eco Contract + Eco Design and Brembo, under the patronage of the Municipality of Milan.

Es brent!, a title taken from a 1938 Yiddish song, directly calls out the visitor in a prophecy. “Our city is burning“ - the lyrics read - ”and you stand there watching with your arms folded.” Six large transparent flags hang from tall flagpoles outside the gallery. The 2025 works, belonging to the “Foundations” cycle, allude to the invisibility and unrecognizability of the powers that govern the world from 1945 to the present. In the entrance hall, a large neon mounted on a typical advertising structure proposes the ambiguous relationship between a society's dreams and their consequences. On the second floor, some paintings from the “Fireworks” series are inspired by night shots of bombed cities and missile launches. Upstairs, a new painting cycle takes us into the inner dimensions of our feeling of time, while some installations reveal how reality is layered, creating existential puzzles in our daily lives.

Paradiso is an installation conceived as a dystopian image of a sky in the historical present, where ideal perspectives have collapsed. A monumental environmental work on 3,000 square meters that directly confronts the present reality. The visitor sees an emptied heaven, reduced to a skeleton, consumed by time. The seven heavenly vaults are half-collapsed, infiltrated by moisture, with precarious insulation. The seven halls of angelic hierarchies are empty, inhabited by clochards wrapped in thermal blankets. In the pathway, among filthy latrines and puddles at piles of snow, one senses that everything has resulted from violence. A marble wall with the names of angels is shattered. In the last room, beyond an iron portal, an underground track evokes the railroad to the death camps.

As the artist himself states, “Paradiso is a piercing metaphor of a time in which human beings have slowly ascended the sky only to ravage, disown and empty it. It is an analogy of the gradual destruction of every ideal, even that of democracy, of the poisoning of the very concept of sacred in the society of indifference. Paradisois a cruel, disenchanted vision of a world that no longer believes in itself, nor in an ideal horizon, and inhabits a dark, desolate land on which the sky has fallen in shattered fragments.”