One Art, Please!: Stefano Arienti and Marco Mazzucconi

  • STEFANO ARIENTI – MARCO MAZZUCCONI

    ONE ART, PLEASE!

     
     

    curated by Maria Vittoria Baravelli

     

     

     

    May 23, 2026 – september 5, 2026

    at
     
    PRIMO MARELLA GALLERY LUGANO

    Via Lucchini 10, 6900, Lugano - Switzerland

  • Primo Marella Gallery Lugano is pleased to present One Art, Please!,  the new exhibition in Switzerland by the Italian artists Stefano Arienti and Marco Mazzucconi, curated by Maria Vittoria Baravelli.
     
    The project emerges from a dialogue between two artists who came of age during the same moment in Italian art, between the late 1980s and early 1990s, and who have since developed distinct yet intersecting practices shaped by a number of shared concerns. Both artists engage with images, objects, forms, and their shifting possibilities of meaning. In their work, things never remain entirely fixed: they are altered, displaced, manipulated, or rendered ambiguous through minimal gestures capable of profoundly transforming perception.
    Stefano Arienti and Marco Mazzucconi approach art history, classical culture, and visual tradition as a living archive of forms and images to be revisited and reactivated in the present.
    Their relationship to imagery is never purely referential; what belongs to the past is reintroduced into circulation, questioned, at times contradicted, and continually transformed.
     

    The title One Art, Please!, borrowed from Mazzucconi’s eponymous series, carries the lightness of a joke — almost like an order placed at a bar counter. Yet embedded within this ironic phrase is a central question: what do we ask for when we ask for “a work of art”? A stable object? An image to possess? A decorative presence?

    Or something that continues to shift each time it is seen, used, or relocated within a new context?

    The exhibition unfolds around this threshold: the moment in which an image ceases to be only itself and becomes something else. Rather than following the logic of separate monographic sections, the exhibition is conceived as a constellation of correspondences and resonances. Arienti’s and Mazzucconi’s works draw close, respond to one another, and at times blur through affinities and dissonances.
    One work calls forth another; one gesture generates the next. One thing after another.
     
    As curator Maria Vittoria Baravelli explains:
  • We imagined this exhibition as a sequence of passages, detours, and subtle shifts in meaning. I was not interested in creating separate rooms, one for each artist, but rather in constructing a path in which the works could respond to one another.
    In this dialogue between Stefano Arienti and Marco Mazzucconi, art emerges as a field of continuous transformations: every image can be reactivated through a gaze, a gesture, or a new context.
  • Marco Mazzucconi, One art, please! #7, 2026 Graphite, water colours, soft pastels and acrylic on cotton paper, resin sprayed and mounted on Dibond with welded aluminium frame, 139 × 180 × 5 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Stefano Arienti, Curva dell'Epte (da Claude Monet), 2026 Wax and modeling clay on poster mounted on panel, 98,5 × 128,5 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Marco Mazzucconi, One art, please! , 2026 Graphite, water colours, soft pastels and acrylic on cotton paper, resin sprayed and mounted on Dibond with welded aluminium frame, 71 × 100 cm (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Stefano Arienti, Sentiero nel bosco, 2026 Wax and modeling clay on poster mounted on panel, 88,5 × 69 cM (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

    Marco Mazzucconi, One art, please! #7, 2026

    Graphite, water colours, soft pastels and acrylic on cotton paper, resin sprayed and mounted on Dibond with welded aluminium frame, 139 × 180 × 5 cm
  • One possible key to reading the project lies in the Italian expression prendere una cosa per un’altra — to mistake...

    Stefano Arienti, Alberi e sottobosco (da Vincent Van Gogh), 2026

    Wax and modeling clay on poster mounted on panel, 98,5 × 128,5 cm

    One possible key to reading the project lies in the Italian expression prendere una cosa per un’altra — to mistake one thing for another. To exchange, confuse, substitute: to see something and believe it to be something else.

    It is a minor perceptual misunderstanding, but also a poetic possibility.

    Within the exhibition, this slippage becomes a way of observing how an image can shift status, lose its original function, and acquire a new one.

     
    In the Pongo series, Arienti intervenes on reproductions of masterpieces from art history — from Monet to Van Gogh — applying a childish and domestic material directly onto the image surface. The gesture is simple, almost tender, yet the result radically alters perception: the reproduction is no longer merely a copy, and the museum icon is returned to a physical, manipulable, and open dimension.
    In the Lampo series, meanwhile, the image is traversed by seams and zippers — concrete elements that cut across the surface while calling its boundaries into question. Alongside these works, Arienti’s drawings revisit fragments of classical imagery and deep-rooted iconographies, reactivating them through a minimal mark poised between memory and invention.
  • Mazzucconi’s practice often revolves around the meanings we project onto objects and image-making devices. In the Gilded series, the Baroque...

    Marco Mazzucconi, Pezzo dorato - Gilded #12, 2016, Canvas on frame, 76 × 100 × 9 cm

    Mazzucconi’s practice often revolves around the meanings we project onto objects and image-making devices. In the Gilded series, the Baroque frame — traditionally intended to contain and ennoble the artwork — becomes an autonomous sculpture. What should remain at the margins of the image shifts to the center: the frame no longer merely delineates, but becomes surface, volume, and an architecture of vision.
     
    In the One Art, Please! series, Mazzucconi begins with an apparently secondary image: the painting hanging on a wall within a comic strip or domestic interior. From this detail emerges an ironic reflection on the status of the artwork, understood simultaneously as domestic object, marker of taste, commodity, decorative presence, and still-possible space for painting. The patch of color contained within the frame seems almost to resist the order intended to contain it: a free gesture unfolding within a structure designed to discipline it.
     
    Counterbalancing this lightness is Playground, a series of mirrored stainless steel works interrupted by fields of oil paint. Here, the physicality of the material, its reflective surface, and the tension between industry and painting introduce a more grounded and structural register into the exhibition.
  • Through these works, One Art, Please! constructs a field of relationships between artwork and reproduction, frame and image, gesture and surface, memory and transformation.
    High and low, art history and everyday materials, irony and gravity coexist without cancelling one another out.
     
    The exhibition does not seek a definitive synthesis between the two artists, but instead allows a dialogue of proximities, frictions, and resonances to emerge. The artwork no longer appears as a stable object, fixed once and for all, but as something still capable of changing state: through a gesture, a gaze, a misunderstanding, or a new context.
    Ultimately, One Art, Please! is also this: a simple and impossible request. To ask for a work of art as one asks for a coffee, while knowing that art never truly arrives in the form in which it was ordered.
  • Born in Asola in 1961, Stefano Arienti lives and works in Milan. The Artist graduated in Agricultural Sciences in 1985...
    Stefano Arienti at the Politecnico delle Arti di Bergamo – Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, Italy.
    Born in Asola in 1961, Stefano Arienti lives and works in Milan.
     
    The Artist graduated in Agricultural Sciences in 1985 with a thesis in virology, while simultaneously developing his artistic and cultural education by attending Corrado Levi’s courses at the Politecnico di Milano.
    He was part of the Italian art scene, alongside other young artists, during the period of renewal that followed the seasons dominated by Arte Povera and Transavanguardia.
     
    He has held solo exhibitions at some of the most important Italian art institutions, including: MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Arts (Rome), Castello di Rivoli (Turin), GAM – Gallery of Modern Art (Turin), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin), MAMbo (Bologna), Fondazione Querini Stampalia (Venice), Fondazione Antonio Ratti (Como), Villa Croce (Genoa), Palazzo Ducale (Mantua), Galleria Civica (Modena), Galleria Nazionale (San Marino), Villa Carlotta (Como), Villa Celle (Pistoia), and Palazzo Marchi (Parma).
    He has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the 44th and 45th Venice Biennale (Italy), the 12th Rome Quadrennial (Italy), the 3rd Istanbul Biennial (Turkey), the 2nd Xinjiang International Art Biennale (China), the 7th Gwangju Biennale (South Korea), and the 9th New Delhi Triennale (India).
    He has also taken part in group exhibitions at major international institutions, including: Triennale Milano, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (Rome), Ca’ Rezzonico (Venice), GAMeC (Bergamo), Museion (Bolzano), MAGA (Gallarate), Hangar Bicocca (Milan), MART (Rovereto), Palazzo Grassi (Venice), Palazzo Reale (Milan), Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato), PAC – Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea (Milan), MoMA PS1 (New York, USA), Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneva, Switzerland), and ICA – Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, UK).
  • Born in Milan in 1963, Marco Mazzucconi lives and works in Milan. The Artist has exhibited in prestigious galleries and...
    Marco Mazzucconi in his studio in Milan, Italy.

    Born in Milan in 1963, Marco Mazzucconi lives and works in Milan.

     

    The Artist has exhibited in prestigious galleries and institutions, including: Castello di Rivara (Turin), PAC – Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea (Milan), Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato), MART – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (Rovereto), Serpentine Gallery (London), and the 12th Rome Quadrennial (Rome).

  • STEFANO ARIENTI – MARCO MAZZUCCONI

    ONE ART, PLEASE!

     
     

    Curated by Maria Vittoria Baravelli

     
     
     
    23 MAY, 2026 – 5 SEPTEMBER, 2026
     
    at
     
    PRIMO MARELLA GALLERY LUGANO
  • Works
  • Installation Shots
    Installation view. One Art, Please!, Primo Marella Gallery Lugano, Switzerland, 2026.