Opened on November 15 and running until March 8, 2026, From Gonzalo Borondo to He Wei. New Perspectives on Contemporary Painting from the Recent Acquisitions of the THE BANK Foundation ETS opens at the THE BANK Foundation – Institute for Studies on Contemporary Painting in Bassano del Grappa. The exhibition aims to serve as a privileged observatory on the global contemporary art scene, with a particular focus on figurative painting. The displayed collection, called The Bank after the former branch of the Banca Commerciale Italiana that houses the works, includes over 1,200 paintings documenting the plurality of painterly explorations from the 1980s to the present, both in Italy and abroad. The current exhibition, curated by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi, highlights, through forty-nine selected artists, what is defined as a “silent revolution” of contemporary figurative painting, closely connected to the urgent issues of our time.
AA.VV., “Da Gonzalo Borondo a He Wei”, 2025, exhibition view at Fondazione THE BANK ETS, Bassano del Grappa. Ph. Tommy ilai & Camilla M.
This is not nostalgic or regressive painting. The artists featured reflect, directly or indirectly, on problems related to the medium itself, meta-painting, and the complex relationship between figurative and abstract art. Some works function as devices of representation, while others act as objectual presences that redefine the traditional genres of art history. Painting becomes the subject of the work itself: through the painterly language, the artists pursue a continuous search for truth, often independent and unpopular, in a gesture that is simultaneously one of resistance and critical awareness. Although the exhibition does not explicitly aim to explore a specific theme, a profound interest in the concept of memory emerges unmistakably, expressed in many forms: personal, social, historical and symbolic. This is no coincidence; memory represents the mechanism through which contemporary figurative painting asserts its relevance in an era of technological mediation of human sensitivity and uncontrolled proliferation of images. Among younger generations, this interest manifests in a particular attention to the archival dimension, driven by an anxious awareness of a future that seems only capable of worsening. Yet, this is not a passive, museum-like memory. As Biasini Selvaggi emphasizes, painting does not merely refer back to a nostalgic past; it interrogates it, critically reworks it and challenges it. Memory thus becomes an act of resistance against forgetfulness, flattening and uniformity.
AA.VV., “Da Gonzalo Borondo a He Wei”, 2025, exhibition view at Fondazione THE BANK ETS, Bassano del Grappa. Ph. Tommy ilai & Camilla M.
Among the artists exploring this concept and its various manifestations, Ariel Cabrera Montejo, a Cuban artist, appropriates historical painting, subjecting documentary rigor to the fluidity of life. He combines episodes from the interwar period and the Cuban War of Independence, the aesthetics of the Belle Époque, and heroes and heroines, under which lies a visceral nonconformism toward documentary and official history. For him, painting serves as a tool to investigate Cuba’s historical memory, colonial past, foundational myths, and collective identity, recovering the value of painting as a means of historical and archival recording, but one that is consciously subjective and reinterpreted. Alberto Castelli, a Turin-based artist, centers his work around memory, understood as daily application and discipline. Painting is not a creative episode but a meditative, persistent practice, a way to engage in dialogue with the past and oneself.
AA.VV., “Da Gonzalo Borondo a He Wei”, 2025, exhibition view at Fondazione THE BANK ETS, Bassano del Grappa. Ph. Tommy ilai & Camilla M.
Pete Wheeler uses “collective memory” as his material: images multiply and dissolve into visual short-circuits, prompting deep reflection on recollection, visual tradition, and critical reinterpretation. This is memory as fragmentation, stratification, and repetition, just as it occurs in our contemporary experience saturated with images. Emanuele Giuffrida translates his troubled childhood into his works, creating personal memory as painterly material. White Sheet and Chair touches on memory in its most intimate and harrowing form: it recounts the drama of death in a mafia-strangled city, transforming trauma into an image that does not heal but remains as a silent, powerful testimony to collective pain. Grazia Cucco, with her liturgical atmospheres and sacred bestiary, adds another layer to this exploration of memory: the spiritual one, inhabiting the most ancestral rituals and symbols.
AA.VV., “Da Gonzalo Borondo a He Wei”, 2025, exhibition view at Fondazione THE BANK ETS, Bassano del Grappa. Ph. Tommy ilai & Camilla M.
What emerges from this exhibition is that contemporary figurative painting is neither an anachronism nor a refuge from the present. It is, rather, a sophisticated tool for understanding and metabolizing the present through the past. The artists on display demonstrate that painting retains the unique ability to transform memory into visual experience, making recollection in its many forms a tangible presence, a body that occupies space. In an era where the future seems increasingly uncertain and the past ever more elusive, and where digital memory is reliable but soulless, figurative painting emerges as one of the last strongholds of non-algorithmic thought, a sensibility resisting flattening. It is not nostalgia; it is awareness. Memory becomes a critical and creative act, one that questions rather than asserts, interrogates rather than celebrates. From Gonzalo Borondo to He Wei documents, ultimately, a quiet yet decisive revolution: that of a generation of painters who understand that to speak to the present, one must listen to the past, and that warm, conflicted, ambiguous, symbolic memory is the most reliable tool we have.
Info:
From Gonzalo Borondo to He Wei. New Perspectives on Contemporary Painting from the Recent Acquisitions of the THE BANK Foundation ETS
curated by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi
15/11/2025 – 08/03/2026
Fondazione THE BANK ETS
Via Orazio Marinali 52
Bassano del Grappa (VI)
www.fondazionethebank.org/it
Elena Barison is a contemporary art historian specializing in the relationships between art, ecology and gender studies. She explored the verbal-visual practices of the neo-avant-garde with a thesis on Tomaso Binga, whose archive she now curates in Rome. She collaborates with Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice and with various independent organizations and magazines.
NO COMMENT