An infinite object winks in the darkness: a thin, unstable column that rises from the ground and reaches, somewhat askew, who knows where. Tips are gratuities—the ones at the bar or those that all grandchildren have received from their grandmothers or grandfathers. La mancetta, as my grandfather used to call it, with a diminutive that suggested both the tenderness of the gesture and the meager amount of money he would give, was always made up of loose change—there were even ten-lira coins with little ears of wheat—that seemed made to be stacked one on top of the other, in small, wobbly vertical rows. This image of piled coins… perhaps the fault of some dormant memory of comic strips. Tips is Tosi’s column of coins: a patinated bronze structure, a casting that reproduces a resin matrix, preserving all its imperfections. Thus, thanks to these roughnesses, the discourses that could be associated with it—linked to money, capitalism, and destruction—obviously and especially environmental, which is also cultural—quickly pass through the observer’s mind, leaving room for broader, more expansive considerations. Tips are also advice: suggestions from those who have experience or are old enough to have seen and known a great deal. From the earth rises this stalagmite of driven capitalism, an archaeological relic of a contemporary moment that is exploding, but also a plant born of a chimerical magic bean, resembling chewed corrugated cardboard, climbing upward toward a space beyond our reach. Thunders: a sound that resonates deep and beguiling, so vast that we can perceive its contours with our hands, with our bodies. It bubbles and draws us into a corner, where a small chandelier illuminates a domestic scene: a rocking chair, with a little old woman sleeping soundly beneath a thick blanket. It is from her that the great roar originates. This small resin sculpture, barely 30 cm long, assumes an enormous form that propagates through space, entirely filled by its expanded, pulsating, pervasive sound: a torrential storm, with booming thunder. The sculpture, whose face is treated on the surface as if the wrinkles were drawn in ink, in some way recalls very ancient figurines of female deities: like them, she too is closed in on herself, small and charged with the cosmic energy of thunder and rain—a gentle, vibrating idol whose body is motionless in an attitude that emanates archaic stillness. The thundering grandmother has not fallen asleep to the sound of the rain; rather, it is her sleep that generates the storm. For the exhibition Tips and Thunders, Federico Tosi has conceived a series of interventions that occupy the space through a generative force that is at once physical and emotional. The works resonate with one another and with the architectural space, expanding beyond measure like a telluric force that, through propagation, stirs archaic memories and possible images. As in a lucid dream journey, in which the scene is illuminated only by isolated cones of light, the reverberation of the real generates fantastical and surreal writings. Tosi’s works possess a complex spatiality that does not resolve itself within the works alone; their reading does not end at their plastic boundaries but also entails the involvement of something that lies outside them. They continue beyond themselves, in some way asking the viewer to enter the game. Their nature does not lie in being illustrations of ideas, nor is their peculiarity aesthetic provocation: Federico is a saboteur of living-room complexities and ingratiating refinements. His works push toward a lucid stance in favor of invention and discovery, claiming clarity, peremptoriness, and impertinence for the artwork—one that allows archaic dimensions, culture, pop imagery, and specialist practices external to art to dialogue together (his biography notably highlights the fact that he holds a diploma in thanatoesthetics and thanatopraxis). Probably, his images captivate us so deeply because they stir memories sedimented in our ancestral memory, of animals grown through narratives. Tosi does not seek to polarize; he prefers to tell stories, to fray, to widen the meshes of feeling—as in Sapore di Mare (2022), where the viewer is not asked to stop at the uncanny image of the dolphin devoured by rats, but to try to imagine situations from a divergent point of view, one that allows different energies to emerge. Like the What if… of comic books. Finally, his research has to do with time—with its flow forward or backward, which crosses eras and surpasses them, which slips over things and transforms them. And this transformation always carries something cruel, yet at the same time gentle and alluring. The images are familiar, yet they vibrate with a glitch that transposes their meanings into an elsewhere that floats between fiction and the visionariness of a dubious medium.