The exhibition Our Souls at Night, hosted by Galleria Umberto Di Marino, takes the form of a collective investigation into a generation suspended between failed promises and fragile utopias. The works of Omar Castillo Alfaro, Guendalina Cerruti, Gwen, Miriam Marafioti, Margherita Mezzetti, Gabriella Siciliano and Yulia Zinshtein are interwoven in a fluid narrative that does not seek a point of arrival, but dwells on the fractures and voids that inhabit contemporary existence.
AA.VV. “Our Souls at Night”, 2025, installation view (Oscar Castillo Alfaro, Yulia Zinshtein, Gabriella Siciliano) at Galleria Umberto Di Marino Napoli, ph. Danilo Donzelli courtesy Galleria Umberto Di Marino and the artists
The exhibition moves between different languages and materials – painting, sculpture, installation – without imposing hierarchies or obligatory paths. There is a constant tension between intimacy and alienation, between the desire to belong and the awareness of widespread isolation. The bodies and landscapes represented are never simply what they appear to be: they become porous surfaces, criss-crossed by memories and lacks, liminal territories that elude stable definition. Some works seem to oscillate between nostalgia and disillusionment, evoking an idealised past that clashes with the cracks of the present. The human figures, often fragile and incomplete, do not appear as protagonists of the narrative but as transitory presences, poised between the desire to be seen and the fear of disappearance. Other interventions, on the other hand, push the language towards a more material and concrete dimension, exploring the relationship between object and subject, between what is created and what remains behind as waste or trace.
AA.VV. “Our Souls at Night”, 2025, installation view (Oscar Castillo Alfaro, Gabriella Siciliano, Miriam Marafioti, Guendalina Cerruti, Gwen) at Galleria Umberto Di Marino Napoli, ph. Danilo Donzelli courtesy Galleria Umberto Di Marino and the artists
In particular, the paintings by Yulia Zinshtein – born in Finland in 1990 – and Margherita Mezzetti – born in Siena in 1990 – offer contrasting interpretations of loneliness: Zinshtein portrays figures with sketchy, caricatured bodies sitting at bar tables, expressing an inability to relate to people; Mezzetti, on the other hand, through collages of smooth, pale bodies, arouses disquiet by merging everyday images with fictional narrative elements. Miriam Marafioti – born in Genoa in 1996 – paints a cartographic reality that plays with the representation of the real and scientific landscape, contaminating it with acid colours and invasive natural elements. Gwen – born in Romania in 2001 -, on the contrary, evokes a darker and more perturbing perception, leaving the viewer immersed in nightmares populated by monsters and witches. Omar Castillo Alfaro – born in Mexico in 1991 – explores the persistence of identity traumas in the development of a post-colonial narrative, revisiting ancestral practices from his homeland. Finally, Gabriella Siciliano – born in Naples in 1990 – and Guendalina Cerruti – born in milan in 1992 – address the difficulty of leaving the liminal space between adolescence and adulthood: Siciliano through the aesthetics of soft toys and carousel animals at rest, Cerruti by combining childhood toys such as shiny beads with a crude do-it-yourself aesthetic.
AA.VV. “Our Souls at Night”, 2025, installation view (Miriam Marafioti, Gabriella Siciliano, Yulia Zinshtein, Margherita Mezzetti) at Galleria Umberto Di Marino Napoli, ph. Danilo Donzelli courtesy Galleria Umberto Di Marino and the artists
What these practices have in common is their ability to make visible a condition of suspension, a sort of emotional apnoea that reflects the state of an entire generation that has grown up between the promise of an unlimited future and the reality of a present that seems to stretch on forever without evolving. In this context, the exhibition becomes a space for confrontation and reflection, in which melancholy is not just a state of mind, but a critical device through which to observe the world. Our Souls at Night offers neither solutions nor reassuring closures. Rather, it brings out the tensions and fragilities of a time that struggles to recognise itself, but that precisely in this uncertainty finds new possibilities for storytelling. The artists present do not propose absolute truths, but invite the public to pause in the voids, silences and shadows, exploring that nocturnal space where souls reveal themselves in their most vulnerable and authentic form.
Info:
Omar Castillo Alfaro, Guendalina Cerruti, Gwen, Miriam Marafioti, Margherita Mezzetti, Gabriella Siciliano, Yulia Zinshtein. Our Souls at Night
22/02 – 05/04/2025
Galleria Umberto Di Marino
Via Monte di Dio 9, Napoli
www.galleriaumbertodimarino.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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