Behind the curtain

Recently, I happened to imagine Daniele Milvio wearing the clothes and even the skin of the sculpture entitled Händler / Dealer by the German artist Katharina Fritsch. The simulacrum, from 2001, is entirely painted in a fiery red colour and it embodies the seductive character of the art dealer and the trade itself: a skilled charmer, always dismissive of the reason why the effort exists, but never making it obvious, they deal in diplomacy and competence, dispensing heteroclitic knowledge, amiable expressions of their diversified interests.

She envisions him with his hair pulled back into a ponytail that is aligned with his spine at a tangent with his shoulder blades, and she adds a distinctive goat foot that peeps out from under his fully straightened suit, indicative of the potentially diabolical nature of his work.

Milvio, on the other hand, has more dishevelled hair, reluctant to be perfectly aligned and tends to flow freely and disorderly under the nape of his neck. The goat foot, so to speak, he instead reserves for the characters in his paintings and sculptures, a pantheon of often sinister figures that are almost always distorted, with elongated fingers and bodies tapered like prisoners in a vortex. These are creatures transfigured by suffocating alienation that dehumanizes them, revealing their profound existential unease. They are unstable comets in a personal mythological galaxy composed of fallen deities: the geography teacher, the tailor, the hanged man, the obliterator, but also the accident, the last supper and the omen.

Milvio disdains approximation or indifference, far preferring the almost maniacal in-depth studies that in his mind range in disparate fields, expressions of a chorality of jumbled interests that are interconnected and pour back into artistic practice. Among the most recent are pruning techniques, Japanese methods of fish dissection, filleting, gutting and scaling, perfume formulas from low to high notes, Italian literature from the Second World War and pataphysical graphics. He doesn't give up any of his creative possibilities — for this reason too, red, which demands constant attention and sets many of his paintings on fire, is definitely pertinent to him.

The artist moves with ease between different expressive media, making it impossible to define him with a single term, or to give him one that represents him more than another. He is, for example, as much a painter as he is a sculptor! Within the genres he also varies his techniques. There are, of course, recurring ones and I believe also favourites — such as lost-wax casting of bronze — but always in a wide variety of experiments.

Themes also evolve, as do the roles he takes on. For some time now, for example, he has transformed his studio, which he shares with Emanuele Marcuccio, into an exhibition space that is increasingly structured as a cultural project. This has certainly contributed to the re-emergence of historical figures such as Luigi Zuccheri and Antonio Rubino, but also to the presentation of young artists of the same age.

If I had to highlight one aspect that most distinguishes him that I particularly appreciate, I would say it's his undisputed ability to find unique and refined exhibition strategies, along with his ability to layer content that presents itself in disguise. Paintings in wine barrels cut to make frames, as if the images were floating on top of an inebriated stupor. Or a series of life-size doors with architraves, jambs and panels left open to reveal images painted on paper and applied to tartan fabrics. Monochrome paintings like the sculpture in my incipit or formalised in contrasting duotones in snakeskin in an aseptic environment like a luxury accessories retailer. Bronze mop handles supporting globes on oblique sticks that light up like outdoor lamps. In this dynamic landscape, nothing is exactly what it seems. On the contrary, it tends to take on other guises, new roles and equilibriums based on the interpretative perspectives that the artist wants to stimulate.

It depends on from where you intend to untangle the yarn or look at the knotted mess. How can you interpret, for example, an exhibition of paintings presented in constant semi-darkness where each canvas is illuminated only by the bronze casts of the hands of the artist who painted them, and which now serve as wall candelabra? Are they all self-portraits through the subjects represented? However, whether the exhibition is immersed in darkness or lake mist, it is always about multiple narratives and the palpable tension between the visible and the invisible, between what is revealed and what is concealed. This aspect brings us to another distinctive characteristic: the intrinsic theatricality, the mise-en-scène that challenges conventional habits and invites the spectator to question their role as observer.

Sipario rises and falls along this threshold of active involvement and the contrast between what is shown and what remains veiled. The sculpture — currently in production as the winner of a public competition to create a piece of art for the entrance of the new tower designed by Mario Botta in Via Verdi — will be presented by the end of this year as a life-size bronze bas-relief made with the lost-wax casting technique, of a portion of the real curtain of the Teatro alla Scala that is a metre and a few centimetres long and about three metres high. The meticulous and lenticular rendering of every detail, from the decorative elements that embellish it to the visual rendering of the fabrics of which it is composed, would correspond, if it were a perfume, to the top notes, those that first strike the sense of smell. It is a portion of the drapery that includes the section that touches the floor in order to incorporate, in a prurient mannerist complacency, the whole universe of fringes and embroidery. Milvio intends to recreate the epithelial complexion of the drapery at the moment in which the two bands meet, leaving only a slight chink, a breath of space, a moment in time through which to spy, ideally, in a direction that only now becomes ambivalent. 

As for the low notes of our fragrance wafting through the centre of Milan, the ones that should linger in the memory and be articulated in thought: the passer-by is invited to look at the gap without any certainty about which side of the threshold in they are on. This is probably why the element of a hand moving a curtain panel in the first sketch has been eliminated. It is now more ambiguous to imagine which side of the curtain we are on. The body of the work — always remaining in the metaphor of the creation of an essence — is to be configured like many other works by the artist, and more than other works, like a portal, a place and a moment of transit, between the sacred and the profane, between life and its representation. Sipario stands on the edge and therefore sub limen, towards the boundary between relativity and elativity. The very notion of the sublime implies a push upwards looking downwards, with the starting point very much in mind. It is a restless journey into the area of disturbances to go beyond the moenia mundi and perhaps reach the templa serena of knowledge. Or from a meteorological point of view, to go beyond the aer, the low and turbulent air, and reach the clear, serene and possibly divine aether.

And then, in conclusion, the motif of the drapery remains dominant, an element in itself iconographically charged, with profound symbolism, capable of being the only unit of measurement of the darkness that hides among its folds and of the mystery that passes through it. The Madonna della Misericordia by Piero della Francesca generously opens the drapery of her cloak, which is another type of curtain, and allows the broken-hearted faithful to enter her personal space in order to console them, or perhaps to welcome their souls after death. If this were the case, even the Marian portal would be a final illumination paid for with the currency of death. The true epiphany as a pledge of life. Milvio, for now and for the Teatro alla Scala, opens only slightly to let a breath of air pass through.

Milovan Farronato
An independent curator, Milovan co-founded the Chiara Fumai Archive based in Bari and Milan, and in 2019, was the curator of the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale

Translation by Alexa Ahern