Le Banquet

A.MORE gallery presents from February 20th to April 26th 2025, Vittorio Valiante’s first solo exhibition in Milan, “Le Banquet” curated by Domenico de Chirico.

The young Neapolitan artist Vittorio Valiante, born in 1991, in this exhibition places the emphasis on the importance of the body, understood as the main access point to reality. The body is seen as the vivid foundation of human experience, a true form of knowledge and relationship with the world. And then, the flesh that constitutes it, to be understood as a crucial point of confluence between physicality, identity, integrity, tactility and relationship with the other, is inextricably linked to the perception and value of the most immediate experience.

His most recent research takes shape thanks to a vision in which fragments of furniture and building elements abandoned on the street are transformed, metaphorically speaking, into human debris, pieces of flesh. “These remains become an allegory of the current condition of the individual, reflecting a seriously dislocated and significantly overburdened system, where excessive production and insatiable greed lead to the most sinister sloth and the inexorable decay of the human being – states the curator – Its intent is to represent all those paradoxes inherent to progress which, rising and falling simultaneously, leave man reduced to mere cannon fodder. Here, the flesh, seen mainly through the lens of ethics and responsibility towards others, is not only a physical dimension, but is also that place in which the vulnerability of the human being and his responsibility towards others is manifested.

The central idea of ​​this new series of works develops specifically around the idea of ​​fragmentation, according to which all these fragmentary elements left aside are transformed into food prepared and then served to diners to be voraciously consumed. A.MORE gallery becomes the stage for an intense and surprising installation. The visitor finds himself in front of a banquet, hence the title of the exhibition, which will shock him and make him reflect. The banquet, historically a symbol of abundance and freedom, is thus uniquely reformulated as a moment of celebration of life without brakes, without inequalities, free from the suffocating constraints imposed by institutions and finally freed from the implacable fear of other people’s judgement.

His artistic practice arises from an incessant dialogue between discipline and chaos, in which the technical mastery of the pictorial medium becomes essential. Through a personal and changing color palette, with irregular brushstrokes and a dense pictorial material, he tries to translate existential sensations. His painting explores material contrasts: the roughness of raw paint meets the delicacy of oil finishing, in an attempt to poetically represent a violent and raw reality.

Through the human figure, sometimes ethereal and other times altered, Valiante highlights an increasingly deafening tension between beauty and suffering, solemnity and transience and between sacredness and flesh. In this sense, he also explores the concept of creative violence, an idea that combines the destructive element with the regenerating one, in a continuous cycle of death and rebirth, in the hope that the latter can uniquely take the path of emancipation, respect and union.

Group Show – The Voyage Out

Milan, October 2024 – A.MORE gallery presents from 9 October to 9 November 2024, the group exhibition “The Voyage Out” with works by Marco Bacoli, Margaux Bricler, Alessandra Cecchini and Vittorio Valiante, curated by Domenico de Chirico.

Born with the aim first of exploring the human mind and then outlining research on the experience of subjectivity, the collective exhibition in question borrows its title from Virginia Woolf’s first novel – “The Cruise”. Metaphorically speaking, a tumultuous journey on the open sea that pushes us to face complex topics such as the complexity of human psychology, the flow of consciousness, growth and the consequent discovery of ourselves and others, love, aspirations, desires, vulnerability of life and criticism of society. The exhibition pays particular attention to the current female condition, which oscillates between the essential desire for independence and the more current misoneist education than ever.

The works of the four artists dialogue with each other, revealing a mix of internal conflicts whose emotional and mental states seem to be particularly sensitive.

“The concept of elsewhere, both refuge and trap, is inextricably linked both to the inevitable subjective experience and to the necessary psychological reconnaissance – states the curator Domenico de Chirico -. And so it is that among stiffened fragments of human bodies, relics of centaurs, nudity, unusual transparencies, routine psychoses, graceful suspensions and fleeting or even erased faces, the heterogeneous collective exhibition “The Voyage Out” is born and shaped, at the hands of Marco Bacoli, Margaux Bricler, Alessandra Cecchini and Vittorio Valiante”.