The trace is the component that unites the works of Debora Fella (Milan, 1990) and Mariangela Zabatino (Milan, 1972): the traces exhibited in the double solo show, “In Dissolvenza”, at Finestreria Art Gallery do not have an immediate and direct explanation, but are layered in a deep and dense way in the imagination of the observer. Both artists’ practices are characterized on the search for fragments, visual and emotional memories as in an indistinct diary that offers dreamy visions of past and present.
Debora Fella, Mariangela Zabatino, “In Dissolvenza”, installation view, Art Gallery Finestreria, Milano, 2025, ph. credit Claudia Ponzi, courtesy Art Gallery Finestreria e le artiste
The artists’ painting is in some ways oriented toward writing by using signs and a typical gestural expressiveness that fit into that gray area between visual art and handwriting, until the whole evokes a form endowed with meaning: free, open and constantly evolving. Both artistic practices suggest an essential ambiguity, whether the works are images in the process of being defined or forms on the verge of dissolving. Perhaps in reality the paintings aim to bear witness to an elusive reality, caught in the instant before its disappearance; it is precisely this state of uncertain suspension that generates a tension in the viewer who witnesses a constant change of lines and images, like the sensation of a visual memory. The references of both Debora Fella and Mariangela Zabatino are well rooted in the cultural and artistic context between the 1970s and 1980s of Milanese abstraction. Taking up the idea of painting as a gradual process and construction, both artists create their works through layers, gestures, erasures and sensations.
Debora Fella, Mariangela Zabatino, “In Dissolvenza”, installation view, Art Gallery Finestreria, Milano, 2025, ph. credit Claudia Ponzi, courtesy Art Gallery Finestreria e le artiste
On the pristine walls of the gallery, the visual languages of the works mingle and merge without ever devaluing each other, on the contrary enhancing the uniqueness of each individual work. Visiting the exhibition, one has the impression of wandering in a continuous and complex place of transit, a place of abstract and smoky, almost metaphysical forms with a quietly perceptive and poetic existence.
Debora Fella, Mariangela Zabatino, “In Dissolvenza”, installation view, Art Gallery Finestreria, Milano, 2025, ph. credit Claudia Ponzi, courtesy Art Gallery Finestreria e le artiste
In particular, the intense and powerful link between memory and vision recurs in Debora Fella’s works, focusing on the use of glazing and layering of materials to produce evanescent and rarefied images. The tiny squares thus conceal a process that is as overlapping as it is meditative in which the artist draws by subtracting materials already laid over the support. The grays are blurred and dense and dominate the works on display, lending an atmosphere of studied heaviness and suggesting intimacy and introspection in artistic practice. In addition, many of the subjects depicted come from natural and plant imagery; fragile figures suspended in time and space that tell of dreamlike journeys and symbolist readings of a world akin to the artist’s personal.
Debora Fella, Mariangela Zabatino, “In Dissolvenza”, installation view, Art Gallery Finestreria, Milano, 2025, ph. credit Claudia Ponzi, courtesy Art Gallery Finestreria e le artiste
In contrast, Mariangela Zabatino’s work is visually lighter and more incorporeal while arising from a direct, physical gesturality. Strokes, lines and ornaments dance together with shapeless chromatic patches on the pictorial space. Her artistic practice focuses on movement: the way the artist creates works is an intense search for the essentiality of gesture, thus producing paintings from the absolute cognition and perception of movement and matter. In proximity to Zen philosophy, Mariangela Zabatino does not focus on the present time of the artistic act, but on the sedimentation and release of the blocks by making the image of the personal unconscious emerge and from the sum of several creative moments. Her subjects also come from a natural memory, but her frontal representations return light floating organisms with alien features in constant tension between presence and disappearance.
Info:
Debora Fella, Mariangela Zabatino, In Dissolvenza
curated by Claudia Ponzi
dal 27/05/2025 al 20/06/2025
Art Gallery Finestreria
via Ascanio Sforza 69, Milano
artgalleryfinestreria.com
Irene Follador (Venice, 1997) is an emerging critic and curator. She graduated first in Art History at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, and then she obtained a master’s degree at NABA – Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan. She has been collaborating with Juliet Art Magazine for a long time and, at the same time, she carries out her independent curatorial practice; her research and interest mainly tends towards works of moving images and new Media within the contemporary art system.
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