Fuori come fiori: Luca Boffi’s rural art on show at Galleria Fumagalli

Last day, at Galleria Fumagalli, to visit Fuori come fiori, Luca Boffi’s first solo exhibition in Milan. His works break through the gallery walls and project us into rural landscapes, sometimes crepuscular, sometimes bathed in sunlight. The artist-farmer, in this indissoluble dual guise, conducts a literal field investigation of the transformations of the landscape and of the processes of reciprocity between living beings within the natural environment.

Luca Boffi, “Fuori come fiori”, Galleria Fumagalli, Milano, 2024. Foto © Lucrezia Roda, courtesy Galleria Fumagalli

For this exhibition, the artist has adapted two of his previous installations to the gallery space and has presented a series of new, material and multi-sensory works that lend the exhibition its title, with the sound of a nursery rhyme. Natural materials personally collected by the artist, from the noblest to those traditionally considered distant from the artistic world, are layered on the surface of the boards of Fuori come fiori: white millet, thistle flowers, weed berries, viburnum berries, carrot flowers, poplar wood, ivy, silt from the Secchia river, charcoal and dung. The materials are wrapped and supported by a thin net on which Boffi has printed photographs, using a technique previously explored in his Panorama Imaginaire installation during Panches Contact 2023. There, images printed on fabric interacted with the climate and weather situation, constantly offering new views, embodying transformation as an inherent feature. For his Milan exhibition, Boffi printed on the fabric images of the landscape he sees in Campogalliano, near Modena, to represent both visually and materially his daily surroundings. The uniformity of the panel sizes contrasts with the organic unpredictability of nature, disrupting any sense of rigid seriality. The mesh, as well as stretching over the canvases, reappears in two installations: one composed of a bird net and the other one of a climbing plant net, both interwoven with natural and floral elements.

Luca Boffi, “Fiori bianchi di carota selvatica a forma di sole”, 2024, in “Fuori come fiori”, Galleria Fumagalli, Milano, 2024. Foto © Lucrezia Roda, courtesy l’artista e Galleria Fumagalli

Additionally, the exhibition also features two significant earlier projects. The first, Pioppo Ciao, is a film created in collaboration with Francesco Tosini as part of the Caro Campo project, developed in Campogalliano between 2020 and 2021. The film – accompanied by the book Caro Campo. Diario di lavoro, winner of the 9th edition of the Italian Council – serves as a diary of visual notes of the two years spent in symbiosis with a field of two hundred and ninety poplars, accompanied till the moment of cutting and felling in a ‘playful surreal dramatic conversation that slowly disappears into the place’. The second project presents the photographic documentation of Monochrome RGB, an environmental installation conceived and created for the event Forever Is Now at the Pyramids of Giza (24 October – 16 November 2024) in partnership with Galleria Fumagalli. In this work, the geometric form of the square interacts with that of the pyramid, seen through a grid, an elemental structure that invites a new way of perceiving reality.

Luca Boffi, “Monochrome” RGB, 2024; “Forever Is Now”, Giza, Egitto, 2024. Foto Roberto Conte, courtesy l’Artista e Galleria Fumagalli

Boffi’s artistic practice is transformative, both rigorous and iridescent. Starting with the investigation of the grid as an optical device – initially intended to strip painting down to its most fundamental level -, the artist then moved from this ‘zero degree of painting’ to start working in the fields, merging artistic creation (predominantly mental) with manual agricultural labor. This shift reflects his will to work on the reduction to an artistic alphabet – visual and material – of a reduced number of elements. His work, which develops more in time than in space, is aimed at those who can embrace change and appreciate the significance of non-productive time.

The exhibition gives back a piece of research that is rooted in the earth and develops upwards, with the desire to create community places, in both an architectural and poetic sense. It seeks to honor collective memory while addressing the needs of both land and community. «It is you in the city who call it nature. It is so abstract in your heads that even the name is abstract», declares Bruno from Cognetti’s The Eight Mountains. Boffi then restores nature to its tangible essence. Through his work, he speaks of the personification of things, of the effort that allows us to become aware of what surrounds us and of the commitment we must pour into it in order to take care of it and rediscover the extraordinary in the ordinary that shapes our lives.

Costanza Mazzucchelli

Info:

Luca Boffi. Fuori come fiori
27/11/2024 – 21/02/2025
Galleria Fumagalli
Via Bonaventura Cavalieri, 6, 20121, Milano
www.galleriafumagalli.com

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