It’s a warm evening, in the most beautiful city in the world, with the Film Festival and its red carpets now a memory, yet, just steps away from the Biennale Gardens, something very different is happening. There, on via Garibaldi, a former butcher shop opens like a healed wound: inside, the white space of the 10 & zero uno gallery becomes the body of a work.
Avelino Sala, “Anatomy of a Still Life” installation view at 10 & zero uno, Venice, ph. Filippo Molena, courtesy 10 & zero uno
Avelino Sala arrives from Gijón, with his calm voice and his sharp objects, and brings an exhibition that seems like an incision on the present. “Anatomy of a Still Life” is not a still life. It’s a heart beating beneath the surface, a dialogue between the baroque and neon lights, between suspended time and the rush of tourists. Sala takes the theatrical language of vanitas and dirties it with today: Murano knives (decidedly impressive), feathers that don’t fly, maps of Venice hanging like fish in a cold storage room. Each piece is a cry masked as silence.
Avelino Sala, “Anatomy of a Still Life” installation view at 10 & zero uno, Venice, ph. Filippo Molena, courtesy 10 & zero uno
The first work, Naturaleza muerta con cuchillos, shows glass blades: tools that in the butcher shop served to cut, divide, open. Here, instead, they sparkle like relics and, at the same time, denounce. They are memory of the trade, but also mirror of the city that, like exposed meat, risks ending up on the counter of tourist capitalism. Then there are the feathers. Naturaleza muerta con plumas: cabezas y góndolas. Light, almost imperceptible, yet nailed in a short circuit: the lightness of air against the weight of history. Venice lives suspended between postcards and supermarkets, between gondolas to photograph and children who no longer play in the squares. It’s a city that mirrors and deforms itself, an open-air museum where life resists in small gestures, in markets that survive, in shopkeepers who don’t give up.
Avelino Sala, “Anatomy of a Still Life” installation view at 10 & zero uno, Venice, ph. Filippo Molena, courtesy 10 & zero uno
Finally, Naturaleza muerta con pescado. A map of the city hanging like a cold body, waiting. Venice here is fish and victim, it’s landscape in decomposition, but also organism that can regenerate. There’s a question suspended in the air: how much longer will it be able to resist, and above all, who will defend it? Sala says: «The artist has no answers, observes and returns in unusual forms». And this is what he does. He takes knives, feathers, fish and turns them toward us. He asks us to look. To choose whether we want to be spectators or inhabitants, whether we want a city as scenography or as a living body.
Avelino Sala, “Anatomy of a Still Life” installation view at 10 & zero uno, Venice, ph. Filippo Molena, courtesy 10 & zero uno
Advice: Look at the exhibition as it should be looked at, not from inside the gallery but from outside it. You won’t regret it. Outside the gallery, the crowd of tourists returning to hotels or the mainland. Inside, in the silent white of the former butcher shop, another tension is breathed: not of flashes and red carpets, but of questions that remain for a long time, like subtle wounds. Venice, after all, has always been a theater. But now, Avelino Sala seems to tell us, it’s up to us to decide whether it will be tragedy or resistance.
Info:
Avelino Sala. Anatomia di una natura morta
curated by Miguel Mallol
6/09/2025 – 12/10/2025
10 & zero uno
Castello 1830, via Garibaldi, Venezia
www.10zerouno.com
Independent artist and curator. Founder of No Title Gallery in 2011. I observe, study, ask questions, take informations and live in contemporary art, a real stimulus for my research.
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