Starting from the idea that the artist “is neither man nor woman but belongs to the world,” the Academy of Macerata presents an unconventional exhibition—beyond gender.
Within the spaces of GABA.MC, the gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts in Macerata, the exhibition Men, only men, simply men inaugurates the second phase of a triennial curatorial journey envisioned by artistic director Antonello Tolve, inspired by the words of Tomaso Binga, who declared that the artist “is neither man nor woman, but a person without age, without nationality: someone who belongs to the world.”
With a display that is airy and ethereal, orchestrated through a dance of emptiness and presence, the group show dismantles spatial and temporal linearity in favor of a deliberate, harmonious disarray—one that captures the vibrant pulse of Italian creativity over recent decades. In the opening gallery, analytical painting by Antonio Passa converses with the sensual contours of bodies captured by Andrea Chemelli, while Flavio Favelli’s pressed tin box assemblages share space with Filippo Centenari’s climbing sculpture in plexiglass, PVC, and copper. A peaceful and unexpected coexistence of languages emerges: Paolo Gobbi’s delicate modularity engages with the vivid glass enamels of Pierpaolo Lista and the rich brushwork of Gianluca Capozzi; Ivano Troisi’s painted iron sculpture makes way for Pierpaolo Marcaccio’s Chromatic Blackboard; and the shadowy hues of The Year Without Summer by Lamberto Teotino find resonance with the interactive sculpture of Giuseppe Stampone, subtly offsetting the luminous purity of works by Adrian Tranquilli, Domenico Antonio Mancini, and Lello Lopez.
A symbolic bridge between the first and second rooms is formed by a historic piece by Pino Pinelli, which—through an imagined generational handoff—guides the gaze toward ascia#2 from the Defunctional Bodies series by Iacopo Pinelli, among the youngest artists featured. In parallel, Mauro Evangelista’s large figurative canvas opens a dialogue on the many possible articulations of line and color, joined by Paolo Bini, Maurizio Meldolesi, Marco Raparelli, and Enrico Pulsoni, whose floating panels find their spatial counterpart in the sharp steel characters of Cristiano Berti’s Incubo Succubo. Meanwhile, on the ground, sculptural tensions emerge: a stark interplay of material and meaning plays out between Antonio De Marini’s arabesque marble and corten steel, Luca Cerioni’s resin and metal, and four remarkable maquettes from Maurizio Mochetti illustrating the conceptual genesis of his work Lines of Light in Curvilinear Hyperspace.
The journey, heralded by Andrea Savino’s oil painting, continues down a corridor divided into three distinct, successive moments. On the right, a project sketch by Gian Maria Tosatti and a drawing by Maurizio Quarello accompany the projection of What Education for Mars by Valerio Rocco Orlando. On the left, Paolo Icaro’s Left Palm Measurement at 77 Years Old, Giuseppe Pietroniro’s collage, and Vettor Pisani’s Philosopher’s Stone enter—and never quite exit—the tautological loop of thought constructed by Fabrizio Cotognini. The final space confronts the age-old tension between naturalia and artificialia, spotlighting the investigations of Giuseppe Tabacco, the biotechnological explorations of Luigi Pagliarini, and reflections on ruin and remnants, viewed from divergent perspectives by Ciriaco Campus and Giovanni Termini. These dialogues extend, inevitably, to the intimate and potent works of Antonio Della Guardia, Benito Leonori’s compressed ash cube, and Giulio Cassanelli’s polystyrene construction.
Linguistic plurality reigns in the final gallery as well, where large-scale installations by Eugenio Tibaldi and Giovanni Scagnoli, Salvatore Sava’s sculpture, Giovanni Gaggia’s textile work, and Spigolangolo by Bruno Conte resonate with the contributions of Andrea Chiesi, Piero Ceccaroni, Alessandro Sarra, and Francesco Parisi. Through these, the conversation on the expressive mark, initiated in the second room, finds no closure—but rather, a continuation.
Hovering with irony over the swamps of mere sexism—the title’s insistence on repetition (men, only men, simply men) and the use of pink hues throughout the exhibition graphics are no coincidence—the show asserts “a desire to transcend the simplistic label of ‘gender’ and present a project removed from passing trends.” Trends, Tolve writes, that have “generated a content-less spectacle-factory.” Through the voices of fifty artists and a poetic composition by Nanni Balestrini, the exhibition reaffirms the freedom to “highlight the significance of Italian art in a curatorial world increasingly imprisoned by senseless and obtuse foreign idolatries, or by the commercial pandering of art-as-commodity.”
Giulia Perugini
