Primo Marella Gallery is pleased to share a recent article published by Artribune dedicated to One Art, Please!, the first two-person exhibition bringing together Stefano Arienti and Marco Mazzucconi.
The article explores the long-standing friendship and intellectual affinity between the two artists, rooted in their connection to the Milanese art scene of the 1980s and continuing to inform their respective practices to this day.
Arienti and Mazzucconi first met in 1984 around the Brown Boveri, an abandoned factory in Milan’s Isola district that was temporarily transformed into a space for artistic experimentation. It was within this environment, shaped also by the presence of Corrado Levi and the young artists who gathered around his initiatives, that an attitude emerged which would remain central to both practices: curious, ironic, interdisciplinary, and deliberately resistant to rigid definitions of art.
Four decades later, this sense of freedom remains one of the strongest connections between their practices.
The exhibition takes its title from Mazzucconi’s One Art, Please! series, in which painting itself becomes the subject of an ironic and perceptive investigation. His works depict paintings within imagined exhibition spaces, resembling quick sketches or comic-strip scenes of a possible white cube. Graphite, colour, and perspective become tools for questioning the way we look at a painting and, more broadly, the way art occupies space and captures our attention.
Rather than offering a nostalgic return to the 1980s, the exhibition reveals the continuity of an attitude. The same desire to experiment, to resist definitive formulas, and to leave meaning open continues to shape the practices of both artists today.
One Art, Please! thus becomes an encounter between two distinct yet deeply connected artistic paths: a conversation that began in Milan in the 1980s and continues to generate new forms, new questions, and new ways of looking at art.
The exhibition is on view at our Lugano venue, Via Lucchini 10, 6900 Lugano, Switzerland, until October 9, 2026.
