“Spaziale!” will present ten large sculptural and pictorial artworks resulting from the artistic meeting and exchange between two painters from the same generation, yet with completely different backgrounds and personal histories. Andrea Kvas and Erik Saglia were inspired by Marquise Rambouillet’s literary salon. The Marquise opened the first literary salon in her Parisian Hotel, Hotel de Rambouillet, in 1618. Bored by King Henry V’s royal court, she decided to receive her friends in a specially designed room called chambre bleue (or blue room). For more than forty years, authors, poets, and artists showed cunningness, wisdom, and gossip, inaugurating that conversational art which, during the Eighteenth Century, will bring life to Illuminism and, consequently, to the modern world.
Kvas e Saglia decided to begin from a conversation and a physical place, where to weave not only words but also discussions, colours, advice, materials, exhibitions, recipes, videos, books, pigments, resins, hydro-paint, additives, albums, ASMR, films, memes, and spaghetti. Weekly meetings have taken place in the studio, located in Via Ponti in the city of Milan. There, they created a small, intimate, and narrow salon occasionally open to others, in which the art of conversation, just as in Madame de Rambouillet’s chambre bleue, tried to gain back its original form, made of bodies, glances, and spoken words. The result was the creation of an artistic bond and a close dialogue made of the search for new pictorial and technical challenges, carried out with humour and warmth.
The salon, or the closed room, progressively dilated until it reached today’s paroxysm of a placeless instantaneity, and until it enclosed every moment of our existence. Not a meeting anymore, not a place, but a continuous stream of questions, answers, and observations.
