In Venice, things often seem motionless, as if the entire city were holding its breath between one high tide and the next. Then suddenly someone places an eruption right in front of you. A real one. Or at least its pictorial version. That’s what happens when you enter Spazio SV, where there’s Simone Rutigliano looking at you like someone who has just climbed a volcano and wants to tell you what he saw inside the crater. The exhibition is called Magma, and there’s no more honest title: everything here speaks of something that presses, bubbles, paws at the ground. The artist from Lecce, transplanted to Venice, seems to have reached that phase of life when you realize you can’t keep painting with the brakes on. You understand it from the canvases: no more composed geometries, no cult of detail. It’s as if he suddenly broke the banks and let out everything he had been holding back.
Simone Rutigliano, “Magma”, installation view at Spazio SV – Centro Espositivo San Vidal, Venezia, ph. courtesy Spazio SV
Curator Eva Berno tells you it’s a natural process, like volcanic stratifications. But looking at those broad brushstrokes, sometimes almost cruel, you get the suspicion that this is mainly about necessity: the rising pressure, the earth that can’t hold, the lava that arrives. Boom, end of the truce. The colors have become more vivid, more brazen: tones that seem to want to illuminate the walls of Campo San Zaccaria even when the fog descends at four in the afternoon. And from those incandescent stains emerge barely sketched figures, bodies that seem to remember a handhold only to forget it a moment later. Hybrid presences, not entirely of this world, as if they came from an elsewhere that hasn’t yet decided how much it wants to manifest itself.
Simone Rutigliano, “Ventre”, 2025, olio su tela, 200 x 250 cm, courtesy Spazio SV
It’s the kind of painting that never gives you a definitive answer: it offers you clues, shadows, attempts at form. More than looking at a painting, it feels like witnessing a hand-to-hand combat between the artist and what’s bubbling inside him. And here the past comes into play, the real one, the one you carry with you even when you change cities and lives. Rutigliano comes from Salento, a land of stone, sea and ancient rites, and in his painting you can feel the call of that world. There’s the rhythm of tarantism in it, the idea that crisis is traversed through dancing and that in the end, if all goes well, some balance returns. He too seems to dance while painting: blows, jerks, twists. Each canvas is a kind of self-exorcism, a liberation ritual practiced with the calm fury of someone who knows there’s no rebirth without sweating a bit.
Simone Rutigliano, “Magma”, installation view at Spazio SV – Centro Espositivo San Vidal, Venezia, ph. courtesy Spazio SV
Magma, then, is not just an exhibition: it’s a journey. A voyage inside the head (and gut) of an artist who has decided to get to the bottom of things, even when it’s hot, even when it burns. It’s an invitation to watch the transformation up close, while it happens, without waiting for the lava to cool and become stone. From November 29 to December 20, 2025, at Spazio SV, there’s the possibility of seeing where it all comes from: the explosion, the chaos, the new form seeking its place in the world. And perhaps, leaving, you’ll feel like believing it too, that erupting every now and then isn’t so bad after all.
Info:
Simone Rutigliano. Magma
curated by Eva Berno
29/11– 20/12/2025
Spazio SV – Centro Espositivo San Vidal
Scoletta San Zaccaria, Campo San Zaccaria
30122 Castello – Venezia
www.spaziosv.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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