MATERIE - Solo exhibition by Beppe Madaudo

Beppe Madaudo’s painting inhabits a zone of friction: not between image and world, but between matter and time. His works emerge where the gaze encounters the resistance of the surface, and where figures withdraw from the familiarity of representation to assume an enigmatic presence.

At the core of this practice is a rigorous yet sensitive engagement with materials: pigments, resins, raw textiles, gold leaf. Each element is selected for its capacity to absorb variation and interference. Reflecting on the art of Fra Angelico, Georges Didi-Huberman observed that materials are never neutral supports; they actively participate in the construction of the image, shaping its form and conditioning its visibility. In Madaudo’s work, the preparation of the panel, the texture of the ground, and the application of paint all become integral to the work itself, preserving its memory.

Although firmly rooted in figuration, his approach resists any mimetic ambition. It is a form of realism directed toward what remains opaque and elusive within reality itself. Tension arises from the contrast between the clarity of the figures and the chromatic instability of the backgrounds, between what has been and what is not yet. The images retain traces of earlier gestures: abrasions, erasures, overlays. These marks settle into the material, evoking a temporality made of returns and suspensions.

The artist does not seek perspectival depth. Instead, he turns his attention to the surface, probing and questioning it. Light, too, does not model volume; it seems to emerge from within, as a slow reaction of the material itself. Gold leaf, employed without decorative or symbolic intent, functions as a disruptive element: it refracts, obscures, fragments. It introduces a broken rhythm, as though painting, through its successive layers, were bringing a latent possibility into view each time anew.

Walter Benjamin wrote that it is not the past that precedes the present; rather, it is the present that, for an instant, allows what has been deposited within it to re-emerge. In these images, time likewise manifests itself – discontinuously – through matter.

Several works embody this dynamic with particular clarity. In Bull (2016), oxidized gold leaf traverses the surface without dominating it, catching the light while retaining a sense of depth beneath. In 13 July (2022), craquelure inscribes the horse’s body with a network of fine fractures. In Ephebe (2023), a figure with classical features turns toward an unstable present, carrying with it what time has already dispersed.

This exhibition, Madaudo’s first solo presentation at Aquilani & Sons, brings together a selection of recent works. These panels do not ask to be decoded, nor do they offer explanations. Instead, they invite a slow, almost tactile mode of looking – one capable of perceiving what emerges and what recedes. Within this exchange between presence and gaze, painting rediscovers one of its most fundamental qualities: not that of describing the world, but of bringing it into being once more, each time, through the act of looking.

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