There is a point in the sky where color ceases to be blue and becomes thought. Andrea Mastrovito, with his new exhibition titled When the sky ends, seems to have found precisely that threshold: a subtle boundary where vision meets memory and image becomes narrative. In the renewed space of Galleria Michela Rizzo at Palazzo Palumbo Fossati, Mastrovito’s works unfold like pages of a story that doesn’t proceed in straight line, but in concentric circles. Drawings, inlays, paintings and frottages echo one another like voices in a chorus speaking of time, formation and childhood that never stops questioning the world. The sky, the title says, ends. Yet, in this ending there is a promise of continuity. As if every limit, far from being an end, were an opening toward elsewhere.
Andrea Mastrovito, “Quando il cielo finisce”, 2025, installation view, courtesy Galleria Michela Rizzo, ph. credit Enrico Fiorese
This is the paradox that Mastrovito investigates: what appears infinite – like the sky, memory, youth – reveals itself to be finite, concrete, tangible. But it is precisely this finiteness that makes it inhabitable, ours. Walking through the rooms, one encounters children marching like little crusaders, hiding behind books and catalogs, playing amidst fragments of language. These figures seem to come from a suspended era, where gesture is still instinct and thought has not yet taken form. They are the young protagonists of a modern fable, where rebellion becomes an educational act and miseducation to the real becomes a way to relearn reality. Around them, like benevolent or restless spirits, artists from the past appear: Vito Acconci, Fabio Mauri, Roman Opalka, Nanni Balestrini and many others. They are not citations, but presences: they move among the works like characters in a choral novel, suggesting that art history is a plot that never closes, a continuous dialogue between generations.
Andrea Mastrovito, “Quando il cielo finisce”, 2025, installation view, courtesy Galleria Michela Rizzo, ph. credit Enrico Fiorese
Every work is a threshold: between visible and invisible, word and drawing, mourning and play. In the frottages of commemorative flowers, for example, the gesture of memory becomes living matter, transforming pain into gesture and gesture into thought. In the final blackboards, small scenes of urban guerrilla warfare become parables about knowledge: books and catalogs used as shields, as if art itself could still protect from the chaos of the world. Mastrovito, who has always worked with the language of drawing like a craftsman of time, constructs here a cosmos made of light materials and profound meanings. His is not a painting that represents, but a writing that brings to light: every line, every figure seems to say that the sky, after all, ends only so it can be imagined anew.
Andrea Mastrovito, “Quando il cielo finisce”, 2025, installation view, courtesy Galleria Michela Rizzo, ph. credit Enrico Fiorese
One leaves the exhibition with the feeling of having traversed a coming-of-age story: not only of the artist, but of art itself, which continues to ask who we are, from where we look, and where our horizon ends. Perhaps, Mastrovito suggests, the sky ends within us, every time we stop looking for it.
Info:
Andrea Mastrovito. When the sky ends
15/11/2025 – 7/02/2026
Tuesday – Saturday: 10:30 AM-1:00 PM / 3:00 PM-7:00 PM
GMR. Palazzo Palumbo Fossati
Fondamenta S. Biagio, 800/q, Venice
galleriamichelarizzo.net
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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