Controcuore is the result of a combination of Milizia’s recent work, carried out using various media at different times, following the modus operandi of an artist who is both inclusive and disruptive, eclectic and specific.

“Controcuore” is the name of the cast-iron structure standing between the fireplace and its marble frame. An element of union, of protection, of adaptation, and also the title of the book in which Milizia brings together some of his poems written in 1992 and the analysis of his DNA, carried out through the Genographic Project with the aim of reconstructing his ancestral origins, which turned out to be Greek, Spanish and Portuguese. These poems have recently been translated into Latin and the languages of those countries, through a linguistic game which rewrites them, reinventing their sense. This is the origin of the seven tapestries on show, onto which the verses are sewn, originally produced using the cut-up technique. A technique drawn on at length, ever since the end of the 1950s, by Brion Gysin and William Borroughs, entailing the physical cutting up of one or more written texts in order to piece the elements back together as needs be.

Thus, poems and tapestries, together with twenty-five small-sized paintings created by spreading a blend of nail varnish and correction fluid onto cut-up pages from the catalogue of the permanent collection of the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Malaga. On the background, there are paintings by Spanish artists; in the foreground, the matter of a painting carried out using everyday substances, blown up and expanded. Chemicals from pigments and for retouching, with which Milizia produces dense, stratified works, shaped by a process of subtraction and superimposition.

Two sculptures complete the exhibition itinerary. One is the upshot of a procedure of absolute reappraisal, culminating in a model of utopian architecture. Like the model of a neo-Renaissance building, it is proportioned and rigorous and yet uninhabited, uninhabitable, suspended between its original function and its current dysfunctionality. The second sculpture, made of bronze and produced thanks to a collaboration with the Battaglia Foundry, replicates and reinterprets a “controcuore” the fireplace cast-iron frame which, once again, displays on its surface the traces of the fusion between different cultures.

The exhibition is thus rooted in a logic of accumulation, collection, aggregation and coagulation. It is driven right to the threshold of chaos, yet without ever losing the discipline of analysis, of the skill which Milizia applies to every gesture, forever calibrated and, most of all, the outcome of a meticulous and encyclopaedic study. It’s a cycle of works on fragments and mutation. On the loss and reconquering of shapes and functions. On the transformative process of actions like translation, cut-ups, restoration, but also of time itself, in the inevitable shifting between past and present, and vice versa.

All this leads to a condition of constant instability, a source of inevitable restlessness, but also of an organic excitement in view of the unknown and that yet to be discovered.

Controcuore is the result of a combination of Milizia’s recent work, carried out using various media at different times, following the modus operandi of an artist who is both inclusive and disruptive, eclectic and specific.

“Controcuore” is the name of the cast-iron structure standing between the fireplace and its marble frame. An element of union, of protection, of adaptation, and also the title of the book in which Milizia brings together some of his poems written in 1992 and the analysis of his DNA, carried out through the Genographic Project with the aim of reconstructing his ancestral origins, which turned out to be Greek, Spanish and Portuguese. These poems have recently been translated into Latin and the languages of those countries, through a linguistic game which rewrites them, reinventing their sense. This is the origin of the seven tapestries on show, onto which the verses are sewn, originally produced using the cut-up technique. A technique drawn on at length, ever since the end of the 1950s, by Brion Gysin and William Borroughs, entailing the physical cutting up of one or more written texts in order to piece the elements back together as needs be.

Thus, poems and tapestries, together with twenty-five small-sized paintings created by spreading a blend of nail varnish and correction fluid onto cut-up pages from the catalogue of the permanent collection of the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Malaga. On the background, there are paintings by Spanish artists; in the foreground, the matter of a painting carried out using everyday substances, blown up and expanded. Chemicals from pigments and for retouching, with which Milizia produces dense, stratified works, shaped by a process of subtraction and superimposition.

Two sculptures complete the exhibition itinerary. One is the upshot of a procedure of absolute reappraisal, culminating in a model of utopian architecture. Like the model of a neo-Renaissance building, it is proportioned and rigorous and yet uninhabited, uninhabitable, suspended between its original function and its current dysfunctionality. The second sculpture, made of bronze and produced thanks to a collaboration with the Battaglia Foundry, replicates and reinterprets a “controcuore” the fireplace cast-iron frame which, once again, displays on its surface the traces of the fusion between different cultures.

The exhibition is thus rooted in a logic of accumulation, collection, aggregation and coagulation. It is driven right to the threshold of chaos, yet without ever losing the discipline of analysis, of the skill which Milizia applies to every gesture, forever calibrated and, most of all, the outcome of a meticulous and encyclopaedic study. It’s a cycle of works on fragments and mutation. On the loss and reconquering of shapes and functions. On the transformative process of actions like translation, cut-ups, restoration, but also of time itself, in the inevitable shifting between past and present, and vice versa.

All this leads to a condition of constant instability, a source of inevitable restlessness, but also of an organic excitement in view of the unknown and that yet to be discovered.

Controcuore is the result of a combination of Milizia’s recent work, carried out using various media at different times, following the modus operandi of an artist who is both inclusive and disruptive, eclectic and specific.

“Controcuore” is the name of the cast-iron structure standing between the fireplace and its marble frame. An element of union, of protection, of adaptation, and also the title of the book in which Milizia brings together some of his poems written in 1992 and the analysis of his DNA, carried out through the Genographic Project with the aim of reconstructing his ancestral origins, which turned out to be Greek, Spanish and Portuguese. These poems have recently been translated into Latin and the languages of those countries, through a linguistic game which rewrites them, reinventing their sense. This is the origin of the seven tapestries on show, onto which the verses are sewn, originally produced using the cut-up technique. A technique drawn on at length, ever since the end of the 1950s, by Brion Gysin and William Borroughs, entailing the physical cutting up of one or more written texts in order to piece the elements back together as needs be.

Thus, poems and tapestries, together with twenty-five small-sized paintings created by spreading a blend of nail varnish and correction fluid onto cut-up pages from the catalogue of the permanent collection of the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Malaga. On the background, there are paintings by Spanish artists; in the foreground, the matter of a painting carried out using everyday substances, blown up and expanded. Chemicals from pigments and for retouching, with which Milizia produces dense, stratified works, shaped by a process of subtraction and superimposition.

Two sculptures complete the exhibition itinerary. One is the upshot of a procedure of absolute reappraisal, culminating in a model of utopian architecture. Like the model of a neo-Renaissance building, it is proportioned and rigorous and yet uninhabited, uninhabitable, suspended between its original function and its current dysfunctionality. The second sculpture, made of bronze and produced thanks to a collaboration with the Battaglia Foundry, replicates and reinterprets a “controcuore” the fireplace cast-iron frame which, once again, displays on its surface the traces of the fusion between different cultures.

The exhibition is thus rooted in a logic of accumulation, collection, aggregation and coagulation. It is driven right to the threshold of chaos, yet without ever losing the discipline of analysis, of the skill which Milizia applies to every gesture, forever calibrated and, most of all, the outcome of a meticulous and encyclopaedic study. It’s a cycle of works on fragments and mutation. On the loss and reconquering of shapes and functions. On the transformative process of actions like translation, cut-ups, restoration, but also of time itself, in the inevitable shifting between past and present, and vice versa.

All this leads to a condition of constant instability, a source of inevitable restlessness, but also of an organic excitement in view of the unknown and that yet to be discovered.

Controcuore is the result of a combination of Milizia’s recent work, carried out using various media at different times, following the modus operandi of an artist who is both inclusive and disruptive, eclectic and specific.

“Controcuore” is the name of the cast-iron structure standing between the fireplace and its marble frame. An element of union, of protection, of adaptation, and also the title of the book in which Milizia brings together some of his poems written in 1992 and the analysis of his DNA, carried out through the Genographic Project with the aim of reconstructing his ancestral origins, which turned out to be Greek, Spanish and Portuguese. These poems have recently been translated into Latin and the languages of those countries, through a linguistic game which rewrites them, reinventing their sense. This is the origin of the seven tapestries on show, onto which the verses are sewn, originally produced using the cut-up technique. A technique drawn on at length, ever since the end of the 1950s, by Brion Gysin and William Borroughs, entailing the physical cutting up of one or more written texts in order to piece the elements back together as needs be.

Thus, poems and tapestries, together with twenty-five small-sized paintings created by spreading a blend of nail varnish and correction fluid onto cut-up pages from the catalogue of the permanent collection of the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Malaga. On the background, there are paintings by Spanish artists; in the foreground, the matter of a painting carried out using everyday substances, blown up and expanded. Chemicals from pigments and for retouching, with which Milizia produces dense, stratified works, shaped by a process of subtraction and superimposition.

Two sculptures complete the exhibition itinerary. One is the upshot of a procedure of absolute reappraisal, culminating in a model of utopian architecture. Like the model of a neo-Renaissance building, it is proportioned and rigorous and yet uninhabited, uninhabitable, suspended between its original function and its current dysfunctionality. The second sculpture, made of bronze and produced thanks to a collaboration with the Battaglia Foundry, replicates and reinterprets a “controcuore” the fireplace cast-iron frame which, once again, displays on its surface the traces of the fusion between different cultures.

The exhibition is thus rooted in a logic of accumulation, collection, aggregation and coagulation. It is driven right to the threshold of chaos, yet without ever losing the discipline of analysis, of the skill which Milizia applies to every gesture, forever calibrated and, most of all, the outcome of a meticulous and encyclopaedic study. It’s a cycle of works on fragments and mutation. On the loss and reconquering of shapes and functions. On the transformative process of actions like translation, cut-ups, restoration, but also of time itself, in the inevitable shifting between past and present, and vice versa.

All this leads to a condition of constant instability, a source of inevitable restlessness, but also of an organic excitement in view of the unknown and that yet to be discovered.

Controcuore is the result of a combination of Milizia’s recent work, carried out using various media at different times, following the modus operandi of an artist who is both inclusive and disruptive, eclectic and specific.

“Controcuore” is the name of the cast-iron structure standing between the fireplace and its marble frame. An element of union, of protection, of adaptation, and also the title of the book in which Milizia brings together some of his poems written in 1992 and the analysis of his DNA, carried out through the Genographic Project with the aim of reconstructing his ancestral origins, which turned out to be Greek, Spanish and Portuguese. These poems have recently been translated into Latin and the languages of those countries, through a linguistic game which rewrites them, reinventing their sense. This is the origin of the seven tapestries on show, onto which the verses are sewn, originally produced using the cut-up technique. A technique drawn on at length, ever since the end of the 1950s, by Brion Gysin and William Borroughs, entailing the physical cutting up of one or more written texts in order to piece the elements back together as needs be.

Thus, poems and tapestries, together with twenty-five small-sized paintings created by spreading a blend of nail varnish and correction fluid onto cut-up pages from the catalogue of the permanent collection of the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Malaga. On the background, there are paintings by Spanish artists; in the foreground, the matter of a painting carried out using everyday substances, blown up and expanded. Chemicals from pigments and for retouching, with which Milizia produces dense, stratified works, shaped by a process of subtraction and superimposition.

Two sculptures complete the exhibition itinerary. One is the upshot of a procedure of absolute reappraisal, culminating in a model of utopian architecture. Like the model of a neo-Renaissance building, it is proportioned and rigorous and yet uninhabited, uninhabitable, suspended between its original function and its current dysfunctionality. The second sculpture, made of bronze and produced thanks to a collaboration with the Battaglia Foundry, replicates and reinterprets a “controcuore” the fireplace cast-iron frame which, once again, displays on its surface the traces of the fusion between different cultures.

The exhibition is thus rooted in a logic of accumulation, collection, aggregation and coagulation. It is driven right to the threshold of chaos, yet without ever losing the discipline of analysis, of the skill which Milizia applies to every gesture, forever calibrated and, most of all, the outcome of a meticulous and encyclopaedic study. It’s a cycle of works on fragments and mutation. On the loss and reconquering of shapes and functions. On the transformative process of actions like translation, cut-ups, restoration, but also of time itself, in the inevitable shifting between past and present, and vice versa.

All this leads to a condition of constant instability, a source of inevitable restlessness, but also of an organic excitement in view of the unknown and that yet to be discovered.

Exhibition view “Picture Perfect” curated by Fantom, Viasaterna, Milan

Exhibition view “Picture Perfect” curated by Fantom at Viasaterna, Milan

The work is inspired by a mysterious catalogue titled “Catalogue d’une collection de tableaux de diverses écoles, spécialement des écoles italiennes” (Catalogue of a Collection of Paintings of Various Schools, especially Italian Schools) which Fr. Marcello Massarenti, sub-almoner at The Pontifical Court, published in 1881. In the book “Huge Seizure”, Milizia implies that the prelate was a sort of messy smuggler of artworks; the work is an “unusual” horizontal picture wall of 93 elements, the imaginary reconstruction of this catalogue, a collection of 19th-century works, which Milizia made using a secret technique, and where he nonchalantly combines artists, styles, periods.

“… Who knows if they tried to thwart that sale which today would be illegal? We’ll never know, but in any case it could have been the greatest huge seizure of all huge seizures in history. I have a feeling that Father Massarenti was a mere middleman, and that he wasn’t the real owner of that treasure. I want to look for documents on Roman antiquities prior to the colossal sale. I find an interesting book by a German archeologist, Wolfgang Helbig …”


“… Mario Milizia makes light of this idea of forgery, reproduction and looting, creating an imaginary collection of stolen art that is probably much better than a lot of the real art stolen from private homes or minor museums. What Milizia highlights with his project is the allure that surrounds a stolen work of art, in spite of its real economic and aesthetic value. Stolen goods gain some kind of bonus by the simple fact that they have been filched, just as figs picked directly from the tree taste better than those you pay for at the fruit stand. After all, if something – particularly art – is worth stealing, then it must have some kind of value. In fact, if we forget that Milizia’s project is artificial and look at it as an assembly of real works of art, we experience some kind of real visual pleasure. The value of art is about information. We never desire a work of art so much as when it has gone missing. Milizia’s operation precisely addresses the mystery of longing for something or someone only once they are no longer available …”
Francesco Bonami

This project is a tribute, a role-game, an experiment. A strange form of personification. It is certainly a tribute to John Armleder, the artist and the curator. It is a celebration of his art of mixing and mashing-up; it is a homage to his capacity to create intriguing hybrid forms by the juxtaposition of apparently different elements taken from the store-room of history. Being John Armleder means imaging what kind of exhibition he would do today. How would he deal with the latest expressions in the long history of abstraction? How would he temporarily re-combine them in a new mega-mix? How would he image a form of display apt to that? Being John Armleder also means acting in a way that is usually denied to curators. In this respect the project is an experiment; an impertinent act of freedom in arranging a number of different works in one installation. It is an open question about roles, rules and positions. You need to be many people to be John Armleder.

The story of an artist's project and the unexpected twists and turns in the creative process. In un'alternanza di immagini e descrizioni di momenti leggeri come una notte a Ibiza e di inquietudine come l'inspiegabile lucidità di Rothko nel togliersi la vita, il breve racconto “Eyes Wide Open” nasce spontaneamente alla fine di un periodo di lavoro denso di curiosità e noia, alti e bassi, tentativi apparentemente senza logica. Published by Fortino Editions.

This time the game is even harder: classifying the unclassifiable material of feelings and moods, each possible nuance of theirs. If some conceptual artists had already checkmated the positivistic ambition to classification this tool is the youngest and most emancipated child of that tradition. To bring with you at every mundane event. Your friends will be happy to know in real time every imperceptible mood change of yours.