From April 14 to May 15, Longari arte Milano gallery hosts Malù Cruz Piani - The Art of Becoming, a solo exhibition by Malù Cruz Piani curated by Giorgia Perin. The project develops as a direct confrontation between the Brazilian artist’s production and a selection of historical works belonging to the collection of the gallery, which has been active for more than seventy years in the valorization of Italian art.
The exhibition presents six bronze sculptures and five large paintings, set in a context that includes medieval wooden sculptures, paintings from the seventeenth century and art objects from later periods. The dialogue between contemporary works and historical masterpieces defines a relationship based on the material and permanence of forms, as well as a comparison of languages and functions.
Ancient works on display include a Madonna of Mercy dated between 1540 and 1550, attributed to a French sculptor active in the Champagne area and from the Jaqueline Boccador collection in Paris, a large Chinese porcelain potiche (a vase) from theQianlong period (1736-1795), decorated with gilded landscapes and friezes, and a carved wooden Blessing Child Jesus attributed to the Master of the Madonna of St. Augustine, active in Perugia in the first half of the 14th century.
Malù Cruz Piani’s research fits into this context through a practice that focuses on the relationship between body and matter. Trained between plastic arts schools in São Paulo and an apprenticeship at Sergio Tapia Radic’s atelier, the artist develops a methodology based on a process of accumulation and transformation of energy, which translates into pictorial sign or plastic intervention. The title of the exhibition recalls a philosophical reference to the theme of identity and becoming. The project is connected to the idea of “becoming what you are,” in a contemporary context marked by dynamics of fragmentation and pressure toward uniform models.
The Longari arte Milano gallery places alongside the contemporary proposal a selection of works that over the years have been the subject of loans to exhibitions in Italy and abroad, as well as acquisitions by institutions. These include the Holy See, which acquired a group of medieval wooden sculptures in the 1970s, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Pinacoteca di Brera and the Castello Sforzesco in Milan.
The gallery’s activity has also developed through relationships with scholars and critics, including Luciano Bellosi, Carlo Bertelli, Miklós Boskovits, Giuliano Briganti, Enzo Carli, Antonio Giuliano, Mina Gregori, Giovanni Previtali and Federico Zeri. The current management is entrusted to Marco Longari, a member of the third generation of the family, committed to expanding relations with the international market and a member of several trade associations, including the Associazione Antiquari d’Italia, Associazione Antiquari Milanesi, FIMA and CINOA.
“The result of a process of vital sedimentation,” explains curator Giorgia Perin, "the work of Malù Cruz Piani, is not born from nothing, but from a kinetic tension that the artist accumulates and internalizes for weeks, transforming the wait into an explosion of the sign on the canvas or the gesture in the material. Already an athlete and model, Malù Cruz Piani makes knowledge of the body the foundation of her aesthetics, translating muscular dynamism into embodied language. As she herself states, ’art is born from a body that speaks.’ The result is a ritual and dialogic relationship with the material, be it clay or pigment, in which the artist interrogates the support, indulges its resistance and guides its structure in a ’body to body’ that restores a primal dimension to artistic practice. In an era of identity fragmentation and homogenizing pressures, Piani’s poetics stands as a space of resistance. The energy that runs through the works on display recalls the vitalistic tension of theÜbermensch: an absolute affirmation of life that accepts risk and contradiction. At the center of his reflection is the dialectic between the solitude in the multitude and the One in the Whole. Malù Cruz Piani seeks a point of inner balance capable of subsisting in the chaos of global flux with the goal of becoming who one is. His compositions are fields of forces in which heterogeneous elements coexist without annulling themselves, tending toward a form of unity that does not deny plurality but contains and ennobles it. The work thus becomes the place of condensation of invisible relations, but each gesture is spiritually connected to a kind of great universal beat."
Born in São Paulo, Brazil, Malù Cruz Piani develops a multidisciplinary path that crosses plastic arts, fashion and communication. With a degree in Communication Sciences with a thesis dedicated to modern art, she has participated in numerous international exhibitions and her works have entered prominent private collections, distributed between Los Angeles, Tokyo, London and São Paulo.
She is the creator of the cultural project Conversando con Malù and author of the novel Miranda (2023). Her activity outlines a figure of a multifaceted intellectual, in whom aesthetic research translates into a coherent practice between artistic production and existential dimension.
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| Malù Cruz Piani in Milan: dialogue with the masterpieces of Longari arte |
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