Review by Marialuisa Pastò
In attesa del tempo
Luciano Sozio
April 14th – June 16th, 2026
Galleria Arrivada
Via Pier Candido Decembrio 26,
Milan
It is Galleria Arrivada that hosts Luciano Sozio’s latest solo exhibition — a venue that acts as a space of sedimentation for artistic practices and the relationships generated through them. The name derives from the district surrounding the railway station in Chur, Switzerland, where the project was founded in 2010 before relocating to Milan in 2018, while maintaining a dimension of traversal, proximity, and encounter that still defines its identity today. The gallery pursues research oriented toward emerging contemporary production, favouring processes and languages in transformation, alongside forms of dialogue that inhabit the exhibition space as a living, open, and relational organism.
Within this context, curated by Angela Madesani, the exhibition In attesa del tempo takes shape, unfolding through a slow and stratified painting practice that resonates with the very nature of Arrivada: a space that turns transit, suspension, and pause into a precise curatorial posture.
The show, which weaves together a selection of recent and previously unseen works by Sozio, spreads across the gallery’s two floors, articulating itself through the three rooms that structure the exhibition itinerary.
At the entrance, two large paintings from the Hunter series (2025) usher the visitor into a dimension of contemplative stillness, organising the main room as a field of silent composure and suspended time. The discreet allure of ordinary gestures and things emerges immediately as a sensory prosthesis: painting steeped in dilated temporality, made of minimal devices through which the subject rediscovers measure, contact, and perceptual intensity within the noise of the present.
Luciano Sozio, The mirror, 2005-2023, Pigments and acrylic on linen, 150×120 cm. Image courtesy of Paolo Dell’Elce.
Luciano Sozio, Galleria Arrivada, exhibition view. Image courtesy of Alberto Messina.
The room is completed by the velvety volumes of the still lifes — among them Stone Skipping (2024) — the outcome of an image-construction process that reveals a rigorous compositional economy, reconnecting the artist’s practice to an originary dimension of painterly technique, in which form emerges as the slow sedimentation of the visible.
An intimate quietude, however, at times fractured by the latent presence of an intruding element grounded in a pressing contemporaneity: such is the case of the tennis ball in Ace (2024), which insinuates itself as a mimetic presence within a basket of lemons, introducing a silent rupture into the perceptual balance of the composition. Transposed into the imaginary of self-exposure, the work activates a subtle tension: exposure does not coincide with visibility, but with what continues to seep through in the very act of attempting to withdraw. “Hiding is not enough to remain unseen” might be ventured as a synthetic postulate — a hypothetical formula operating across multiple registers: a critique of the illusion of rendering oneself invisible, but also an acknowledgement that the gaze does not halt before absence, but ends up pursuing and prolonging it. Within this paradox lies one of the work’s central tensions: concealment does not interrupt visibility but relaunches it, reversing the act of subtraction itself into a signal — into an involuntary form of exposure.
Luciano Sozio, Ace, 2024, Pigments and acrylic on linen, 50×60 cm. Image courtesy of Paolo Dell’Elce.
Along the perimeter of the lower rooms, works from the Fly Trap series (2022) snake their way, the soft tactility of their surfaces soliciting not only the gaze but activating a perception close to touch — one in which painting recovers a sensory, embodied dimension of seeing. The aesthetic experience thus emerges as a counter-movement against the anaesthetic spatiality of the present, restoring perceptual depth and critical intensity to what dominant spaces tend to reduce to mere passage, distraction, and consumption without memory.
The works do not depict a space: they hijack its conditions. They produce a zone of suspension in which the ordinary regime of perception is slowed, diverted, rendered unproductive in relation to the contemporary demand for immediacy. Contemplation ceases to be aesthetic passivity and becomes an exercise in attention. Geometry here does not organise the visible according to measure and harmony, but operates as a technology of defence. It delimits, contains, resists the continuous invasion of stimuli. It is a minimal architecture of survival: a refuge constructed against the excess of exposure, where coherence and dispersion are not resolved dialectically but held in tension.
Here, painting deliberately renounces its narrative function and the promise of conceptual clarity, activating a re-symbolisation of expressive quality: the return of intensities irreducible to mere information. Lucid impotence becomes critical method — the possibility of dwelling in the unresolved without neutralising it.
The visible thus ceases to confirm what we already know. It resumes exerting pressure, raising questions, unsettling cognitive automatisms. Seeing no longer coincides with recognising.
Luciano Sozio, Galleria Arrivada, exhibition view. Image courtesy of Alberto Messina.
The works do not seek consensus; they offer themselves as reticent presences that compel the gaze to confront its own impatience, reopening an interior space today colonised by the continuous extroversion of attention.
Abstraction thus emerges not as a flight from the real, but as a condensation of the human after the fall of the superfluous: what remains when the image stops competing with the noise of the world — while the chromatic register acts as a tensile device capable of regulating the relationship between subject and sensory excess.
In this light, Sozio’s practice stands in opposition to the contemporary economy of the image, replacing speed and consumability with a temporality made of duration, reserve, and perceptual density.