MILAN.- The Italian venue of Cadogan Gallery is currently presenting Break Easy, German artist Kim Bartelt’s first solo exhibition in this space, with around 20 works, including paintings and sculptures, created for this occasion.

The artist, inspired by the words of the Vietnamese writer and poet Ocean Vuong – according to whom, it is only by tearing down the shield we have been taught to build around ourselves and showing our own vulnerability that an artist can reach his or her fullest expression – has created a series of collages with very thin paper and pastels in delicate tones that aim to express the fragility of our time and the condition of human beings.

“The landscapes I’d like to depict play with the inside and outside, the seen and the unseen, the permanent and transient” says the artist, who has produced a series of large-format paintings and smaller ones made by combining thin translucent sheets, slightly torn at the edges, on the rough surface of linen canvases.

These works in soft pastel colours, which reveal their deep connection to the world of architecture, are in close dialogue with four sculptures, seemingly sturdy, but also made from cardboard boxes covered with thin papers, which as the artist says “are in a way the forms on the canvas stepping out of the frame and becoming figures.”

The alphabet of repeated geometric shapes in subtle, flickering colours that characterises Kim Bartelt’s paintings and sculptures generates a silence of delicate power and intensity. Without offering any form of resolution to her own declaration of fragility, the works engage the visitor in a sensory dimension that reveals the contradictions of the human condition and the emotional resilience required to be an artist.