​GALLERIA MILANO
22/04 | 24/07/2021
Via Manin 13, Via Turati 14 – Milan
Curated by Katia Anguelova
Info: ​www.galleriamilano.com

Galleria Milano is pleased to announce Hyphae - Where things fall and never return to themselves, Riccardo Arena's solo exhibition conceived as an articulated installation that unfolds in the two rooms of the gallery orchestrating collages, photographs, drawings, sculptures and archival material.

The exhibition is accompanied by a Public Program gathered as an integral part of the work. The program includes a panel of conferences by Giuliano Boccali, Professor of Indology, Sanskrit and Tibetology, Maurizio Barracano, art conservator of carpets and scholar of symbology and religions; a musical performance by Fakhraddin Gafarov and Lorenzo Pierobon; a workshop and a series of guided tours. 

After the long-term projects developed in China, Argentina and Russia, the artist embarked on a new research path between Iran, Armenia and Ethiopia in 2017. Travel experiences, studies and investigations in these countries crystallize in a metaphysical poem divided into 21 chapters called LuDD! - Topography of Light, published in 2019. The book constitutes the architecture of Hyphae, a compositional work designed for the spaces of Galleria Milano and developed as a guide for orienting oneself in the imaginaries of the writing.
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On the occasion of the exhibition, the second edition of LuDD! - Topography of Light, will be launched in a limited edition of 350 numbered and signed copies accompanied by images, published by Kunstverein Publishing, Milan & Boîte Editions, Lissone.

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The poem tells, as the author says: “the creation and collapse of a Carpet warped with a light yarn, originated within a matrix by the sacrifice of a Primordial Bull forced inside a particle accelerator. The carpet is a ritual cartography in whose texture come to life geometry, architecture and mirages of consciousness. A ritual cartography crossed by a solitary figure, who following a river guide, embarks on a dissolutive journey in search of the hand that designed and weaved the sacred weaving”. 

In analogy with 'Hyphae' (from the Greek huphḗ, web) - the filaments by which the vegetative apparatus of fungi enters into symbiosis with other organisms and creates an underground network of invisible, interdependent and inextricable relationships - the author intertwines a dense mesh of correspondences between biographies, scientific theories and mythologies to merge and transcend the parts that compose it in a poetic dimension: the mysticism of light and reflection in the works of Rūmī, Aṭṭār and Suhrawardī; Dasht-e Lut, the hottest desert in the world, formed by numberless geomorphological structures that resemble the last vestiges of a sand empire in dissolution; the Girih pattern in medieval Islamic architecture that enabled the creation of the most complex periodic tasselation which in turn constructed almost perfect and quasi-crystalline Penrose patterns, five centuries before their discovery in the West; Hormoz Islands in Persian Gulf, considered the "geologist’s paradise", the place where the enigmatic Zaar tribe dwells; the profound influence of Zoroaster and the simulacre  of perennial fire in the origins of monotheistic cultures; the carpet weaving ritual linked to the destiny of men among the nomadic desert populations; the lunar utopia of Alexander the Great’s conquest; the petrified knowledge that shapes the monastery complex of Sanahin and Haghpat in Armenia; the ruins of Ani, where Gurdjieff claimed to have found an ancient teaching upon which he built his theories and brought him to Ethiopia in search of Sarmoung Brotherhood; the intriguing story of the Nile’s source identified by James Bruce in the Tana Lake in the late IX century; the Tigray monasteries, carved into rock as an architectural geodes, whose priests keep the Tabot, the relics of the Ark of the Covenant.
Hyphae | Teaser