Let’s imagine entering an enigmatic vacuum world, where silence is a luminous volume and thought dissolves into free inventive concatenations. Let’s imagine a biological world observed through an entomologist’s magnifying glass, where the forms look at us suspiciously, or don’t even see us, intent as they are on tearing each other to pieces.
Míles, “Untitled”, 2024, mixed media on paper, 21 x 29.7 cm, courtesy Portanova 12
But maybe it’s not even like that, they’re just proliferating from each other while remaining strangers. These are the first impressions that come from observing a drawing by the street artist Míles, two years later once again the protagonist of a new solo show at the Portanova 12 gallery in Bologna, entitled Sentomologia. The exhibition brings together a series of very recent works on paper, created in the last four months, and is preceded by an antechamber in which some drawings exhibited in 2022 in Esopo – Istinto Indistinto follow one another, a project that drew its original nucleus from five illustrations inspired by as many fables by Aesop, in which the stories of men and animals fighting for survival were synthesized in figurations full of psychic energy. In that series appeared monolithic sculptures of graphite signs that, trying to overwhelm each other, ended up interpenetrating in new hybrid creatures, firmly interconnected in their apparent incoherence.
Míles, “Untitled”, 2024, mixed media on paper, 21 x 29.7 cm, courtesy Portanova 12
The current project continues this line of research focused on the fusion (incredible but made incontrovertible by the quality of the drawing) of distinct entities, coming mainly from the zoomorphic and anthropomorphic universe. Even the title chosen is a hybrid, which refers on the one hand to the artist’s need to assimilate his sensations to return them as an image, on the other to the concept of metamorphosis of which insects are the paradigmatic incarnation, chosen as a deliberate matrix of minks. The exhibition is therefore introduced by the most valuable piece of this series, a drawing depicting a sort of cockroach standing upright and facing the observer with a pierced head similar to a sea urchin and its legs entangled in a maze of arterial and venous brambles, against the backdrop of an indistinct grey-green watercolour swamp. We immediately see how Míles is a tightrope walker of the pen and pencil, challenged by a hallucinatory will to chase visions as fast as lightning and potentially infinite in their simmering. In this drawing you can see the thickness of the ink, which shimmers when illuminated just like the bodies of certain insects in the sun, but also the executive virtuosity of supporting in every detail the multiple directions of his unstoppable internal imaginative flow. A continuous metamorphosis, therefore, feeds his poetic and aesthetic vein here, a force through which the artist models powerful assemblages of anatomical details of animals, humans and plants, crazy in their being completely credible in the passage from one detail to another, but absurd as a whole.
Míles, “Untitled”, 2024, mixed media on paper, 21 x 29.7 cm, courtesy Portanova 12
What gives unity to the subject is, in fact, not the biological logic of the creature evoked, but the plastic harmony of shapes and colors. Not all the works in the sequence on display in the main room, therefore, have insects as their subjects, but each of these hybrids, even if not of entomological origin, seems to possess the same metamorphic prolificacy as insects. The limbs stretch and intertwine like roots, ending in over- or under-sized hands and feet, which sometimes grasp heads, paws, tongues or teeth. There is no longer any boundary between body and body, nor between physicality and psyche, and yet this twisted imagery of enigmatic demons has stringent internal logics although founded on the oxymoronic obstinacy to find continuity in fragmentation.
Míles, “Untitled”, 2024, mixed media on paper, 21 x 29.7 cm, courtesy Portanova 12
A somewhat similar argument can also be made for his style, nourished by academic studies in Italy and a period spent in Japan, but also by literary, cinematographic and comic book sources: the stylistic suggestions he has made converge in his sign are so varied, with alternating prevalences and juxtapositions or alchemical fusions depending on the subject. The head, in fact, is crossed by many simultaneous solicitations and the mental visions in which they materialize are different in the various cultures, in a further game of multiplication: the artist’s is a work of assimilation, deconstruction, stitching, reconstruction and release, through which the images that reach him are morbidly alive on paper in a dense parade of superhuman entities. At the end of the visit, we are accompanied out of the dense introspective dimension of the drawings by the performative environmental intervention on canvas that, as usual, Portanova 12 asks of the artists invited to its headquarters as a free territory for experimentation and research. Of decidedly Japanese inspiration, it shows a large manga face emerging from its own blue hair which, expanding like geometric patterns on the white background, is pierced by shiny and inexplicable animal eyes.
Info:
Míles. Sentomologia
6/02/2025 – 22/03/2025
Portanova 12
Via Portanova 12 Bologna
www.instagram.com/portanova12bologna/
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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