A needle runs through the canvas like it would through flesh. It doesn’t mend, it probes. It doesn’t repair, it records. With his first solo exhibition in the United States, held in the project room of Palo Gallery in New York, Roberto Maria Lino delivers a radical gesture: he transforms the language of abstract painting into a deep reflection on the body, care, memory and wounding. Memoir of a Needle is not just an evocative title – it’s a method, a declaration. Each work – from the Sutura, Spolia, or Red Monochromes series – is the result of a slow, tactile form of writing that draws from biography without ever slipping into anecdote.
Roberto Maria Lino, “Memoir of a Needle”, 2025, exhibition view at Palo Gallery, NY, photo crediti: Alexander Burnazaki, Giulia Benni, courtesy Palo Gallery
Born in 1996 and raised between Naples and Rome, Lino’s practice stems from an early, unusual experience: as a child, he would accompany his father, a heart surgeon, into the operating room. This formative exposure left an indelible mark – not as trauma, but as a method of observing the body, technique and vulnerability. His work consistently navigates a fine line between clinical precision and emotional intimacy, between the surgeon’s cut and the artist’s hesitation. In the Sutura series, Lino stitches together salvaged fabrics – scrubs, undergarments, moth-eaten linens – using red thread that never seeks perfect closure. Every surface becomes a scar, a tension point, a vessel of affect. In one piece created specifically for the show, Lino assembles fragments of his father’s clothing, stitching them together with threads that once belonged to his mother: an intimate and radical gesture that merges medicine, memory, biography and grief into a single vertical structure – like a hand-sewn spine.
Roberto Maria Lino, “Memoir of a Needle”, 2025, exhibition view at Palo Gallery, NY, photo crediti: Alexander Burnazaki, Giulia Benni, courtesy Palo Gallery
Spolia and Red Monochromes further amplify this logic of recovery and tension. The former series takes its name from the Latin term for reused materials: each fragment is a stratified memory, a living trace of a body or a moment. The monochromes, dyed in deep reds, are never just about color. Red is blood, skin, desire, shame. But also language, rhythm, heartbeat. Lino works with discipline – hand-dyeing, tearing, layering, suturing. The result is not traditional painting but a kind of epidermal field traversed by tension and memory. Lino speaks of “painting with a needle”. And indeed, his works sit at the intersection of painting, sculpture and textile. The surface is always a site of friction – between the industrial and the domestic, the impersonal and the intimate, the individual body and its systemic translation. The work doesn’t represent pain; it materializes it. It doesn’t speak about medicine but about its invisible aesthetics: the aesthetics of remnants, of instruments, of wounds that never fully heal.
Roberto Maria Lino, “Memoir of a Needle”, 2025, exhibition view at Palo Gallery, NY, photo crediti: Alexander Burnazaki, Giulia Benni, courtesy Palo Gallery
Palo Gallery, founded by Paul Henkel in the heart of the East Village, is a fitting context for this kind of practice: it is a space dedicated to emerging voices capable of engaging the urgencies of the present with depth and conviction. Lino steps into this context not as an outsider, but as an artist committed to a form of painting that chooses to be fragile and necessary. Memoir of a Needle is not an exhibition “about the body”. Rather, it moves along the threshold between body and memory, between fabric and trauma, between gesture and thought. Lino sews not to close, but to hold things open. He composes not to resolve, but to endure. His works demand time, attention, touch. And in return, they offer something rare: a disarmed intimacy that resists symbolism – and simply remains, like a mark stitched beneath the skin.
Info:
Roberto Maria Lino. Memoir of a Needle
26/06 – 08/08/2025
Palo Gallery
21 East 3rd Street, New York (US)
www.palogallery.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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