Area35 Art Gallery

presents

DAVIDE GENNA. Autofiction

Milan, 23 March – 24 April 2026

Opening: Monday, 23 March 2026, 6:00 pm

Via Vigevano 35, Milan

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Area35 Art Gallery is pleased to present Autofiction, a solo exhibition by Davide Genna, on view from 23 March to 24 April 2026. The exhibition brings together a selection of works produced over the past twelve years, tracing the evolution of a visual language that investigates the relationship between form, memory, and collective imagination through a complex and stratified syntax.

Genna’s works unfold within a suspended space where visual memory intersects with archetypal structure, reactivating a subtle dialogue between classical geometry, pre-Renaissance shadow, and modernist sensibility. Fragmented figures—constructed from reiterated faces and textile surfaces—coexist with elementary graphic architectures—triangles, circles, grids, and checkerboards—that articulate the pictorial field with near-mathematical precision.

Within this framework, the Dantean reference is not narrative but perceptual: what emerges is a journey through interior light and penumbra, where personal recollections expand toward mythic resonance. Geometry—evoking both pre-Renaissance harmonic order and the constructive clarity of the Bauhaus—operates as an invisible armature, holding together fragment and totality, emotion and structure.

The chromatic palette, woven from lucid and vibrant tones, recalls an Impressionist sensitivity. Open yellows, deep blues, enamelled greens, and delicate violets do not describe; they evoke. Light becomes less a physical datum than an emotional memory—an atmospheric presence that infuses the surface with suspended luminosity.

A foundational element of Genna’s poetics is his use of collage incorporating female faces drawn from pornographic imagery. This radical gesture of appropriation and rewriting detaches the image of beauty from the objectified body, repositioning it within a symbolic and collective dimension. Fragmentation here does not imply loss, but recomposition: a sensitive architecture composed of gazes, presences, and absences.

In Autofiction, water, myth, capitalism, eroticism, and geometry intersect in a visual system that is both intimate and structural. The works appear as constellations in which relationships, shadows, and primary forms reorganize themselves into a renewed alphabet of sensibility and sensuality. Classicism and contemporaneity do not function as quotation, but as a living and pulsating fabric—an aesthetic field in which autobiography transforms into shared myth.

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Exhibition Information

Title: Autofiction

Artist: Davide Genna

Dates: 23 March – 24 April 2026

Opening: Monday, 23 March 2026, 6:00 pm

Venue: Area35 Art Gallery – Via Vigevano 35, Milan

Opening hours: 24/7 by appointment

Press Contacts

press@area35artgallery.com

www.area35artgallery.com

The exhibition is part of the gallery’s research program dedicated to contemporary visual languages and their historical roots.