MILAN.- The A arte Invernizzi and Artra galleries are set to inaugurate Gianni Asdrubali. Other Painting, an exhibition curated by Lorenzo Madaro, on Wednesday 24 September 2025 at 6 p.m.

The exhibition, arranged across both galleries - with which the artist has cultivated an intense dialogue for decades - is in the form of an anthology that retraces the essential milestones of his artistic research from his earliest days. The two sections are conceived in continuity, with intersections, tangencies and, in some cases, interweavings that keep them in constant conversation.

Gianni Asdrubali (b. 1955, Tuscania) has pursued his research with conviction since the early 1980s, maintaining an entirely independent and original course. This has taken him beyond the confines of classification, and at a far remove from any -isms or critical/curatorial points of reference. The only exception is Filiberto Menna’s concept of Astrazione Povera, which included Asdrubali alongside Mariano Rossano, Bruno Querci, and others.

With Asdrubali, painting once again assumes a primary spatial function, probing the very essence of the medium after years in which colour, image, symbols, and allegories - however stimulating, innovative, or engaging - had dominated the world of painting.

Right from the early 1980s, Asdrubali has always been a solitary and uncompromising protagonist. Never silent, never inert, his early years of experimentation involved intense work in the rooms of his studio, where he sought the original roots of a trace that is uncertain but always on the move, as it still is today - escaping the canvas, the wall, or the picture itself in its strictest sense. Each experiment became preparation for the gestation and refinement of a style that resists classification, and that never lapses into the chaos of repetition but instead, through its obsessive rigour and restless invention, forms an alphabet in perpetual movement.

Works such as Camurro (1981), Diodiavolo (1981), and Diodiavolo (1982) reveal tangles, contortions, sudden somersaults - traces that oscillate between forceful, penetrating gestures and marks that thin out and dissipate as they expand from their chromatic matrix, rigorously black. This bursts across the surface only to transform and liberate its intrinsic energy. So then, as the years went by, in works like Aggroblanda (1984), Bestia (1985), Zaazze (1986), and Nemico (1986), all included in the exhibition - the trace of each mark became regular in an even more in-depth, precise system of coordinates. Moving away from informal gestures, it recomposes itself in a system in which the mark thins out and, eventually, becomes an autonomous entity. It is now a tubular form that opens onto spaces of fullness and void, into which the white of the surface is inserted, ultimately emerging as a body in itself.

In works such as Malumazac (1990) the trace begins to expand once more - not as a knot but as a free, unfolding form - while in works like Tromboloide (1992) the work itself becomes a silhouette shaped solely by the trace, with the support cut out around its contours. It twists, pursues impossible diagonals, sometimes recoils, layers upon itself, and then surges upward like a wave that ripples before breaking into the absolute freedom of a surface that - and this is the underlying motif of this 1990s phase, the artist’s most mature period - no longer ends at its perimeter but conceptually begins to unfurl and fray, bursting into the surrounding space. This approach fully evolved in later years, especially in works using shaped and assembled canvases, strung together like an archipelago, releasing a ceaseless, inexhaustible energy.

Energy: Asdrubali’s painting is a distillation and fusion of thought and action, impetus and calm, a necessity in the concentrated space of the studio, which is a place of conception and discipline, but also a training ground for the never-ending evolution of the trace itself.

Tromboloide is one of the pivotal works of this transition, pointing in possible new directions. Here, the trace reveals another aspect of Asdrubali’s painting: on the one hand, there is the dense, all-encompassing form; on the other, the semi-dry brushstroke that generates inner perspectives. Painting is thus not simply the result of its action inscribed upon a surface, but also the manifestation of its very process, its own becoming.

The exhibition then continues with an ample section, divided between the two galleries, with works from the 2000s and, especially, his more recent ones. In these, Asdrubali’s energy is fully dilated and the surface plays a sometimes central role in shaping the spaces and perspectives of his brushstrokes. These have become increasingly tumultuous, radiant, at times highly strung, hyperactive, enveloping, and yet dilated - in a constant play of asymmetry and a total renunciation of any stagnating order.

Even in the most recent works, it is clear that Asdrubali’s enquiry beats with the pulse of an experience that probes the inner dilemma of painting: energy and void.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a bilingual catalogue with an essay by Lorenzo Madaro, reproductions of the works on display in the two galleries, and an updated bio-bibliographic section.