Anti-Ascesi
Riccardo Morandi, Sasha Toli
curated by Lorenzo Rubini
27.06.26 - 30.08.26
Anti-Ascesi is a double solo show by Riccardo Morandi and Sasha Toli.
Painting practice is, by its nature, an ascetic exercise, a claustrophobic isolation made of discipline, repetition and renunciation aimed at evaporating the contingency of the world to isolate form. Sasha Toli and Riccardo Morandi's researches fit into this tormented path, rejecting any anecdotal or illustrative temptation to focus on the pure dramaturgy of space and matter. At the heart of this dialogue stands a radical reversal of vertical tension, a deconsecration of ritual that translates into an inversion of meaning; the subject is not the pretext of the work but the pictorial act itself becomes the subject.
The theoretical core of this research is realized and radicalized in works created with a sort domino effect by both artists. The painting thus reveals itself to be an autonomous entity endowed with two distinct but inseparable souls, where the research of the two artists does not cancel each other out but rather layers one on top of the other. There is no synthesis, but rather a coexistence of frictions. The work ceases to be the account of a solitary vision to become an unstable palimpsest, a pictorial whirlwind in which the two identities collide and merge, allowing the sovereign autonomy of the painting to emerge exclusively.
Press release IT
Press release EN
Exhibition catalogue
Artists
Riccardo Morandi
(b. 1997, - Italy)
In his body of work memory holds only a sensorial value; instead, it is the tradition of the subjects in pictorial practice itself that coagulates the final image through reworked classical icons. His admiration lies in Gothic paintings, medieval codex illustrations, and manuscripts, while never straying far from Mannerism and the morbosity of Flemish detail. In 2025 he was the Honorable mention winner of the 17th edition of Prismaartprize. Among his recent exhibitions, PRIMA PROVA Pittura come? at Spazio Torso, Pesaro (2025); Chiamata alle arti 2021-2024 at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York (2024); Sottosopra at Palazzo Beonzo, Genova (2023).
(b. 2000, Narni - Italy)
He lives and works in Otricoli, Italy. Studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino he’s fascinated by the way in which the pictorial morphology manages to assume a “hierofanic” function, a revealing function. The artwork, sometimes considered in contemporary times as numinous ‘object’, is animated by a free creative activity, this allows the influences of the artist to converge in the tragicomic tension, necessary for the work to be solved.
Artworks