Valerio Nicolai exhibition: Ex Sorella

Emanuela Campoli is pleased to announce Ex-sorella, Valerio Nicolai’s second exhibition with the gallery.

From the street, the ground-floor window frames the first room as a scene to be observed. But once inside, it becomes unclear who is the onlooker. Installed side by side, a series of paintings present small heads emerging from the margins of their frame, as if sneaking in from behind the edge or popping up like puppets. The characters are part of the painting, but they also look outward, towards the viewer, who becomes suddenly aware of being watched. As each canvas faces the next, the paintings also look at each other, creating a restless circulation of gazes that is as claustrophobic as it is ridiculous. Nicolai’s work is known to take painting’s glorified subject matters into banal situations. Here, the “destabilization of the frame” and the “act of looking”, a few of the most canonic conceptual strategies in painting, is turned into a comically awkward scene.

Building on the mental architectures of his earlier castles, Nicolai expands the stakes of scale and the experience of space in the paintings exhibited upstairs. An ordinary sofa occupying a vast field of color is illuminated in one of its corners, drawing the eye into an otherwise domestic, inert object. In this “seated sun”, as the title of the work suggests, illumination as divine intervention appears slouching at home. Nearby, a cluster of light switches (Sbadati illuminati, 2025), sits at the center of an expansive, empty plane, their smudged surfaces bearing traces of countless automatic gestures. In Cielo senape (2026), clouds appear inverted, resting on the bottom of the composition in what seems to be cotton scattered on the ground. Nicolai treats scale not merely as a technical device but as a conceptual hinge: miniature and monumental coexist and collapse into one another.

Drawing creates even less hierarchy between the grand themes of art the absurd way they can come into existence in everyday life. Recalling the fairground boards that invite visitors to insert their heads into painted scenes, faces of aging men peek through the body of nuns. Men also hide behind tightly fitted, low-back dresses, but it takes a close observation to detect these passages. Curtains, backgrounds, thresholds and props are minimal elements that Nicolai uses to suggest multiple ways of moving from one reality to another - the shift is never spectacular, a simple element is enough to tilt his scenes into another register.

Valerio Nicolai (Gorizia, IT 1988), lives and works in Milan. He studied at Accademia delle Belle Arti in Venice. Nicolai was awarded the Licini Prize in 2023 and the 2020-21 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Recent solo exhibitions include : Premio Lissone 2025, MAC – Museo d’arte contemporanea di Lissone (with Viola Leddi); Notte da Osvaldo, curated by Alessandro Zechini, Museo Osvaldo Licini, Ascoli Piceno (2023); Solo show, Campoli Presti, Paris (2023); Sole con le code, Clima, Milan (2022); Birthmarker, Galeria Madragoa, Lisbon (2021); Amarena, Clima, Milan (2019) ; Processo a porcospino, Clima, Milan. Recent group exhibitions include: Quadriennale d’arte at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (2025); Facile ironia. L’ironia nell’arte italiana tra XX e XXI secolo, curated by Lorenzo Balbi and Caterina Molteni at MAMbo, Bologna (2025); Gli anni. Episodi di Storia dell’arte a Napoli dagli anni Sessanta a oggi, curated by Eva Fabbris at MADRE Museum, Naples (2025); PORPORA, In continua risonanza at Casa Testori, Milan (2024); Diario Notturno Di sogni, incubi e bestiari immaginari, curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, MAXXI L’Aquila, L’Aquila (2023); Pittura Italiana oggi, curated by Damiano Gullì, Triennale Milano (2023); Panorama Monopoli curated by Vincenzo De Bellis (2022); Expectations, curated by Fondazione Zimei, Pescara (2022); Stasi Frenetica, curated by Ilaria Bonacossa, GAM Torino ; Quadriennale Arte 2020, Roma; Shit and Die, curated by Maurizio Cattelan, Palazzo Cavour, Turin (2014).