Artists

Marcello Maloberti

Press release

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.