Fantasmata, the new solo exhibition by Marta Spagnoli – painter from Verona, born in 1994 – at Galleria Continua, unfolds as a meditation on the metamorphosis of images, the ambiguous space between the visible and the indistinct, between the body and the landscape. The title itself, referencing Aristotle’s concept of phantasma as the lingering impression left by perception, draws the viewer into a realm where figures never fully assert themselves but instead emerge and dissolve in a continuous state of transformation.
Marta Spagnoli, “Fantasmata”, 2025, exhibition view at Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA, photographer: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio
Spagnoli’s painting exists in perpetual tension between order and chaos, figuration and dissolution. Her canvases seem to capture the echo of movement, as if the painterly gesture were never fully fixed but instead suspended between intention and disappearance. In this exhibition, the artist constructs a dialogue between dense surfaces and more translucent color fields, between material stratifications and fluid transparencies that suggest an underlying rhythm, a pulse echoing the breath of the natural world.
Marta Spagnoli, “Fantasmata”, 2025, exhibition view at Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA, photographer: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio
Her images inhabit a liminal space, where subjects are never entirely recognizable, and form remains elusive, compelling the viewer to complete the vision through perception and memory. Mythological and philosophical elements play a central role in Spagnoli’s practice, which seems to draw from an archaic imaginary where humans remain inseparable from nature. In Fantasmata, the body merges with the landscape, losing its fixed boundaries and dissolving into a broader, fluid dimension. This transitional state is what makes Spagnoli’s work so evocative: figures appear as fleeting presences, specters of forms in flux, where the memory of an image holds more weight than its physical representation.
Marta Spagnoli, “Fantasmata III”, 2024, acrylic, oil, graphite on canvas, 160 x 230 cm, courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA, photographer: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio
The exhibition unfolds through a series of canvases of various sizes and drawings on paper, created between 2024 and 2025. The interplay between large and small formats reinforces the oscillation between micro and macro perspectives, between intimate detail and panoramic vision, amplifying the sense of an imaginary world in constant transformation. The pictorial surface becomes a space of exploration, a site where gestures accumulate, fade, and reemerge, evoking a layered temporality that resists the fixed nature of traditional imagery.
Marta Spagnoli, “Algae VI”, “Algae IV”, 2025, acrylic and oil on canvas, 45 x 55 cm (each), courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA, photographer: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio
While Spagnoli’s work is rooted in a gestural and intuitive approach to painting, it also constructs a language that bridges past and future. Her ability to evoke without explicitly declaring, to suggest without defining, positions her work in direct contrast to the immediacy and oversaturation of contemporary visual culture. Fantasmata, in this sense, is a painterly experience that demands slowness, that imposes a relationship of proximity and contemplation, where the eye is compelled to linger, tracing the emergence and disappearance of an image in a single instant.
Marta Spagnoli, “Fantasmata”, 2025, exhibition view at Galleria Continua (sketch), San Gimignano, courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA, photographer: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio
This exhibition is not merely an exploration of painting as a medium but a reflection on its ability to inhabit time, to exist as a threshold between the visible and the remembered, between presence and absence. In an era dominated by speed and an excess of imagery, Spagnoli proposes a radically different approach: a painting that thrives on pauses, on apparitions and disappearances, on fragments that only recombine in the viewer’s imagination. Fantasmata does not offer definitive answers but instead opens up spaces, passages through which one may lose themselves in a language suspended between matter and vision, between gesture and its reverberation in time.
Info:
Marta Spagnoli. FANTASMATA
25/01 – 22/04/2025
Galleria Continua
Arco dei Becci 1, San Gimignano (SI)
www.galleriacontinua.com
Art Curator and Art Advisor, graduated in Visual Arts and Cultural Mediation, with Master in Curatorial Practices, born in 1995, lives in Naples. He collaborates with Galleries and Independent Spaces, his research is mainly focused on Emerging Painting, with a careful and inclined gaze also on other forms of aesthetic language.
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