For the first time in Milan, MAAB Gallery is presenting a selection of recent works on canvas and paper by Luca Padroni (Rome, 1973). These are part of the cycle started in 2021 with the exhibition La vita continua [Life Goes On] at the Museo Orto Botanico in Rome.

The works on exhibit today in Milan invite the public to steep themselves in an unspoilt nature that even has something of a primordial aura, and in which there still seem to be no human traces. The tangle of the forest, with the animals that inhabit it, seems to have no time or place. It refers to a dimension far removed from the stream of human life and conveys the idea of an ecosystem that is still balanced, with its complex rules and vital energy.

In light of the recent pandemic and the ongoing ecological crisis, the nature depicted in Luca Padroni’s painting, although wild and full of danger, communicates a sense of a re-established equilibrium and even serenity. It showcases both a personal memory of the artist, who, with his family, spent part of his childhood in Africa between Mozambique, Sudan and Namibia, and a much more distant, archetypal and trans-generational memory, which does not actually allow Padroni’s painted scenes to be associated with a single, specific geographical area on the earth.

In this regard, a complex yet elementary vision emerges in these works, to the extent that the artist, when talking about the creation of these true visions of nature, referred to an uncontaminated perception of the world that only our most distant ancestors could have been familiar with or could have experienced directly. Here, nature, on closer inspection, is a primal scene twice over: the one where part of Luca Padroni’s childhood took place, and the ancestral scene that refers to the infancy of mankind and the first life on earth. It is in the overlapping of these different temporal planes, between biography and imagination, narratives and biology, that the artist’s pictorial research plays out.

In this way, his painting builds evocative worlds involving history and myth, metaphysical expectations and hidden desires, erudite references derived from the history of painting and references to topical news and the daily flow of life, literary adventures and facts actually experienced. In this way, the visual experience of what was familiar in other times today becomes aspiration and desire, a memory frayed with hope that the kaleidoscope of Luca Padroni’s art succeeds in making current and remote at the same time.