Per volare serve l'aria: Daniele di Girolamo
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Daniele Di Girolamo
Per volare serve l'aria
Solo Exhibition
ON VIEW UNTIL NOVEMBER, 2026
at
PRIMO MARELLA GALLERY MILANO
Primo Marella Gallery Milano
Via Valtellina 31, 20159 Milano, Italy
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Primo Marella Gallery Milano is pleased to announce Per volare serve l’aria, a solo exhibition by Italian artist Daniele Di Girolamo, marking his first presentation with the gallery.
The exhibition takes its title from an essential yet often overlooked condition: air is what makes flight possible. Neither empty nor still, it is a living medium through which vibrations travel, bodies move, and relationships take shape.
Text curated by Niccolò Giacomazzi.
In Daniele Di Girolamo’s project Per volare serve l’aria, the aerial element runs through and connects the works, suggesting an ascensional dimension that is both spiritual and material.
The human experience thus enters into relation with the processes of the natural world, which, in the works, become capable of touching the unconscious and, without needing to be fully explained, of conveying the feelings and tensions that accompany moments of transformation, loss, encounter, and transition.
These are fundamental experiences in the construction of our identity, which can be lived autonomously or through our relationship with others.
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At least once in our lives, we have all dreamed of flying
[...] In the installation Qualche goccia nel vento c’era (2026), the seventy-four plastic cylinders, through their constant rotation, produce a sound reminiscent of the ebb and flow of the waves.
The sea sand encapsulated inside them collides against their walls, recalling the place from which it came. In this dimension, the relationship with others gives way to a more intimate relationship with yourself. Time slows down, listening intensifies: you can allow your mind to descend into the depths and take the measure of the distance that connects you to, or separates you from, the outside world. If you have spent long periods of your life by the sea, you will remember the smells, the sounds, the wind brushing against your face on the beach or as you walked along the water’s edge.
With this work, Di Girolamo seems to reactivate the memory of a place you perhaps did not want to leave.
In the same room, you will find the sculptural installation Flying needs Air (2026), which seems to reverse this direction, bringing you back from introspection towards the other.
Two forms laid out on the floor, made of leather and polyethylene, simultaneously evoke drapery and carcasses, something living and something that is no longer alive. The two presences are connected through an almost imperceptible gesture: the recorded breath of an elderly woman is translated by a device into movement, activating a fan that generates a current of air directed towards two feathers placed on the second sculpture.
You cannot hear that breath, but you can observe its effect.
The echo of a presence withdrawn from the senses survives and continues to act within the space.
It is transformed into air and seeks to reach something beyond itself. As it reaches towards the other, you are visually crossing a fragile bridge, sustained by a minimal movement and by the possibility that the breath will set the feathers in motion.
An image comes back to the mind.
Two children, on a terrace opening onto a valley, were playing with a feather. Taking turns, they held it between their fingers, their arms stretched upwards, and then surrendered it to the current of the wind. The feather began to spin, rising, floating, and hovering in the air for a few seconds—sometimes surprisingly long—before one of them managed to catch it mid-flight. Within this very simple gesture coexist the desire to hold on and the necessity of letting go, the possibility of loss and the anticipation of return. Something similar happens in Flying needs Air, where the breath does not determine what will happen, but creates the conditions for it to happen.
Air thus becomes a vehicle for transmission, a gesture of care, or simply the need to communicate.
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the function of air changes once again: from carrying memories and breaths to acquiring the ability to shape matter.
[...] In Scirocco Barocco (2026), polyethylene, brass, glass, and feathers give rise to forms that seem to have been caught in the instant just before the wind stopped blowing.
You might have the impression that you are standing near drapery worn by bodies. But the bodies are absent.
In the Baroque, such folds would traditionally accompany saints and nobles, figures of power. Here, the centre is empty. The material seems to retain the folds impressed upon it by the wind, and the representation of authority gives way to the action of an intangible force.
Yet something human remains, as the heat-worked polyethylene takes on a texture that may remind you of the surface of a body. In that drapery, you now see a skin that has lost its anatomy.
Emptied of the body, that skin nevertheless retains the memory of a movement. It remains fragmented and displaced, offering no specific direction, but allowing you to find a relationship between distant forms.
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Finally, the encounter with the other appears in its most raw and romantic form
In Beautiful things fading away (Encounter), it truly takes place, carrying with it all its unpredictability.
[...] Two thistles rotate alongside one another. Sometimes they barely touch, sometimes they collide, and at other times they continue along their orbits without managing to meet.
The moment of contact generates friction, producing a fragile sound. You might wait a long time for the spines to collide, without knowing when—or whether—the next contact will occur. Dry, violent, yet also deeply erotic and tender.
Can you recognise in that dance something that belongs to your own encounters?
We seek one another, avoid one another, brush against one another, hurt one another. Sometimes we find each other for a few moments before becoming distant once again. There is no predetermined choreography, and precisely for this reason, every contact is capable of giving rise to different emotions.
As in the works Semina (2026) and Traiettoria di una caduta (2026), the brass tubes trace paths shaped by falls, encounters, and deviations; in the case of the thistles, they replace the lymphatic system, with electrical cables running inside them.
Their rotations mirror the ever-changing nature of relationships, which can sometimes lead to losing one another, while at other times expressing the contingencies of coming together in an embrace and the inevitable release that follows. Throughout this succession of events, trajectories shift, take different directions, and inevitably transform the way we inhabit the world and relate to one another.
It all begins along the coast, where the wind drives wild thistles towards one another until they begin to rub against each other.
Air, the sea, and the act of rising from the ground return once again as forces capable of determining the possibility of a relationship.
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Daniele Di Girolamo in his studio © Caterina Cantò
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Daniele Di Girolamo
PER VOLARE SERVE L'ARIA
Solo Exhibition
ON VIEW UNTIL NOVEMBER, 2026
at
Primo Marella Gallery Milano
Primo Marella Gallery Milano
Via Valtellina 31, 20159 Milano
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Works
