“QUESTE COSE NON AVVENNERO MAI, MA SONO SEMPRE” Exhibition in Pietrasanta – August 2025

I’m delighted to share that my paintings and drawings are on view alongside the ceramics of Italian artist Clara Holt in the exhibition Queste cose non avvennero mai, ma sono sempre, curated by Lorenzo Belli. All works explore mythological themes, weaving together narrative and symbolism.

Hosted at VLP Gallery, my studio-gallery in Via del Marzocco 12, Pietrasanta, the exhibition runs from August 2 to August 25. The opening on August 2 was a wonderful success – heartfelt thanks to everyone who joined us!

From the curator:

“At the heart of mythological tradition—from Homer to Ovid—lies a threshold between the visible and the invisible, between appearance and substance, memory and dream. It is in this blurred and shifting space that the works of Michele Redaelli and Clara Holt take shape. Though their visual languages differ, they share a common sensibility: a desire to evoke, transform, and enchant.

Myth does not belong to the past—it is a time that recurs, that never began and cannot end. “These things never happened, but they always are,” wrote Sallust, pointing to the eternal, symbolic, and visionary nature of mythic storytelling.

It is from this perspective that the dialogue between Redaelli and Holt emerges: a weave of images and forms that do not illustrate mythology but dwell within its emotional tension, its metamorphoses, and resonances. Painting and ceramics become tools not to explain myth, but to make it present—beyond chronological time, immersed in an interior and sensorial temporality.

Michele Redaelli creates color-scapes that seem to arise from an elsewhere—emotional, dreamlike—where stylized figures float across suspended surfaces, animated by layers of transparency and sudden chromatic vibrations. His pictorial gesture, which blends painting, illustration, and a subtle naïve spirit, never seeks linear storytelling: instead, it invites the viewer to drift, like sailors drawn to a source-less call. His sirens no longer sing to destroy, but to speak. Redaelli’s work makes tangible the way matter and image intertwine, generating a tension between action and vision, between sign and color, body and soul. In a time marked by visual and conceptual excess, Redaelli—like Venturino Venturi before him—chooses the difficult path of lightness as resistance; a lightness that, as Calvino once wrote, “is not superficiality, but a way of gliding over things from above.”

Clara Holt, by contrast, begins with narrative tradition and infuses it with a personal, almost intimate, dimension. Her ceramics and etchings—marked by oxides, scratched lines, and fire-toned atmospheres—reflect an ongoing dialogue between form and symbol. Where Redaelli paints chromatic silence, Holt engraves the word of myth, reworking it into a language that is both ancient and deeply personal. Her pieces seem like objects recovered from a sunken wreck, reshaped by contemporary memory. Holt doesn’t simply depict myths—she re-stitches them onto her own skin, weaving together stories and alchemies of fire that give voice to ancestral symbols.
Like Tommaso Ferroni, who reimagines myth through epic, pictorial visions, Holt translates it into tactile, intimate forms. Both transform the ancient into a living language, open to the present. In Holt’s work, Greek mythology becomes a means of exploring the complexity of human nature—intertwining fragility and strength, light and ferocity—with a poetic and visceral voice. Her figures and archaic symbols, reinterpreted through an intimate lens, continue to pulse with meaning and truth.

The exhibition These Things Never Happened, But They Always Are thus becomes a convergence point between two practices where matter and myth merge into suspended worlds. Sirens no longer sing from the abyss, but whisper from shards of color and ceramic fragments; Cyclopes no longer threaten, but rise as archetypal forms charged with memory and power.

The show places painting in dialogue with matter, color with earth, voice with body. The sirens, Polyphemus, the Minotaur, gods transformed into animals—these are no longer just characters from a distant mythology, but tools through which the artists explore the desires, fears, and hopes of our present.

In a time that has lost the habit of deep listening, Redaelli and Holt invite us to “listen with our hands,” to perceive in the intensity of matter that which is invisible: a memory of the divine, an emotional resonance, a trace of longing. In doing so, they reaffirm the role of painting and artistic expression—what Ruggero Savinio called “a physical, corporeal, crafted fact”—as an aesthetic experience that leads us beyond linear time, back to a primordial yet contemporary call.”

Lorenzo Belli