PAC

A new CIELO [SKY] (2024) now rises above Milan. A monument as much as an anti-monument (or an infinite column), after first appearing at the Bangkok Art Biennale in 2022, CIELO was adapted for the outdoor spaces of the PAC as if Milan were the second venue in a global tour of the skies of the world. The mechanical arm of a truck typically used for building maintenance holds a white neon word written in the artist’s handwriting, thereby recasting the poetics of art making as a perpetually incomplete and provisional endeavour. The piece’s monumental aspirations, implicit in its size and vertical elan, are challenged by the inversion of the text and the fragility of the neon exposed to the elements. By reversing the word, Maloberti elicits a visual vertigo: it is as if, plummeting to the ground, the sky were visible only to celestial beings.

The site-specific installation ULTIMATUM (2024) partially cloaks the façade of PAC with galvanised steel sheets, supported by tubular scaffoldings —a signature Milanese product from the city’s industrial peak in the twentieth century. The artwork changes the modernist aesthetics of the building, designed by Ignazio Gardella in 1947–1954, reimagining it as a blade poised to cut. Right from the façade, Maloberti thus introduces a fundamental element of his artistic vision: new, sharp metal, which constitutes one of the exhibition’s red threads, bridging the gap between outside and inside.

M (2024) is a road sign marking the entrance to Milan. Here, it symbolically acts as a gateway to the exhibition. The artist, who holds the road sign motif dear, inverts and suspends it from the ceiling to create an upside-down threshold inaccessible to the public. The title M references Mussolini, for the sign’s inverted position evokes how the dictator’s body was hung upside down in Piazzale Loreto on 29th April, 1945, at the site where fifteen partisans had been executed and their bodies desecrated on 10th August, 1944. Maloberti places M right at the entrance of the PAC, emphasising the social and political dimensions inherent to his artistic practice.

An unusual frieze runs across the entrance wall. The title CHANCE DI UN CAPOLAVORO [CHANCE OF A MASTERPIECE] (2024) comes from a work by Marco Mazzucconi of 1989. In this new work, Maloberti neutralises the violence of a recurring element in his practice—the scissors—by softening their tips with delicate white goose feathers. Maloberti describes this act of hyper- decoration as “whimsical” yet incisive, serving as an emblem of the precarious balance between strength and poetry that underlies every masterpiece.

TILT (2024) is a guardrail that—like a spatial drawing by Fontana— wends its way through the Pavilion’s rooms. Maloberti turns this suburban road safety device into a sculpture, exploring how lines possess the power to separate, divide, and set in opposition. In a work so steeped in contrasts, the minimalism and the sharp shine of steel clash with the rough, organic nature of the “Bianco Altissimo Henraux” marble fragments that support the structure. Here, Maloberti leads the viewer along a predetermined pathway, generating a tangible representation of the tensions inherent to the relationship between artist and audience.

Cut-out fragments from reproductions of Mario Sironi’s paintings (1885–1961) gather into a somber puddle at the center of the room. Continuing the Vir Temporis Acti series begun in 2016, on the exhibition’s first day a performer in the room cut up fragments from Sironi’s universe, turning the floor into a vast, dimensionless canvas. Reversing the traditional roles of artist (man) and model (woman), the performer has turned into a sculptress by cutting up paper material, reshaping it, reconfiguring Sironi’s paintings, and bestowing some new-found lightness on them.

METAL PANIC (2024) is a musical score for a rifle. Reinventing an object’s original function, art shows its power to convert the rifle into a musical instrument. The barrels transform into a Pan flute, filling the space with breath-driven sounds that transport visitors to a woodland realm. A new melody resonates through the exhibition, guided by the artist’s score and punctuated by sudden sonic jolts that reveal the intensity and depth of breath—a force that, at times, gives rise to beauty through its own raw power.

The performance-originated installation BOLIDI [SPEEDSTERS] (2024) references the works of Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980). It consists of sculptures/tables which, during the opening, some performers wore and carried through the exhibition space. At the end of the performance, the performers placed the tables/cypresses in the room, poised to form a small Metaphysical grove. Like silent oracles, the tables reference directly Fausto Melotti’s Sette Savi (1981), displayed in the Pavilion’s garden. As if they were desires, they stand as potential objects, suspended between cemetery and stage.

On a trip to Northern Europe, Maloberti travelled to Horssen, a small village in the southeast of the Netherlands. There, he visited Fluminalis, a company founded by Joannes Peters in 1978, specialised in selling and restoring sacred furnishings. Inspired by Carmelo Bene’s first autobiography, Sono apparso alla Madonna [I appeared to the Virgin Mary] (Longanesi, 1983), the artist decided to purchase a life-sized, 19th-century statue of the Virgin, which Peters claimed had the miraculous ability of welcoming and listening to believers’ prayers. Based on the iconography of the Virgin Mary as she appeared on 27 November 1830 to Catherine Labouré, a young novice at the convent of the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul on Rue du Bac in Paris, the statue of the Virgin is no longer visible. Bitterly turned against the wall, she denies any visual contact with those who seek her out. IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS (2024) creates a disconnect with the audience, leaving them suspended in anticipation of a mystical apparition. Will Milan ever go back to deserving its miracles?

Maloberti began his MARTELLATE [HAMMER BLOWS] series in 1990. Phrases from this series have emerged like visions over the decades, and have come to form a vast collection of political statements, aphorisms, and poetic acts associated with the sacred, the mystical, and the oneiric. Resembling the pages of an open book, eight neon lights fill the main floor space to form sentences of light in front of the large window overlooking the garden which the PAC  shares with the Galleria d’Arte Moderna. Made of light and thus as fleeting as sudden oral manifestations, the MARTELLATE stand out against the natural light that flows in from the garden, offering full and empty spaces to the viewer’s gaze, prompting reflection on each reader’s interpretative efforts: on the gaps each of us fills differently between the words written by others.

Long red and white chequered tablecloths have formed a central element of Maloberti’s vision and works since the early 1990s. Placed alongside an Italian tricolour flag and displayed in the PAC’s Project Room, LA VERTIGINE DELLA SIGNORA EMILIA [MRS. EMILIA’S VERTIGO] (2024) takes its title from a work by Maloberti of 1992, where one such chequered tablecloth was elevated to the realm of art. Paired with Italy’s national flag, the pizzeria tablecloth becomes a stage curtain for an imaginary ongoing theatrical performance of contemporary Italy itself. Construction scaffolding and sandbags suggest that Italy is yet to be built, while at the same time it already requires restoration. This complex process is made even more difficult by stereotypes of Italy as il Belpaese, which the artist finds himself (guiltily?) observing with a hint of bitter irony.

PETROLIO [OIL] (2024) is a tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s novel of the same title, which was left unfinished when he died in 1975 (first edition, Einaudi, 1992). In a minimalist gesture, half-open books are lined up like soldiers on the ground. Stripped of their original function, kitchen knives act as bookmarks, boldly marking the exact middle of the books, their centre and physical heart. While the knives are tools to perform sudden and angry metaphorical slashes that allude to the intrinsic power of Pasolini’s poetics and to his violent death, they in fact rest harmlessly on the paper—suggesting the unfulfilled potency of Pasolini’s message.

The Project Room displays the most significant works from the artist’s early career, almost all dating back to the 1990s. The exhibition space was transformed for this occasion into a familiar setting, reminiscent of the home where Maloberti grew up in Casalpusterlengo—a key location that has never ceased to influence his artistic practice.

Maloberti, his mother, and grandmother appear at the centre of the living room in FAMIGLIA METAFISICA [METAPHYSICAL FAMILY]. Captured in a regal pose, the three figures resemble metaphysical mannequins occupying a space traditionally reserved for a dining table. Immersed in a subdued neorealistic atmosphere, the image captures the essence of provincial domestic life, portraying a matrilineal lineage that the artist aspires to inherit and interpret.

Maloberti’s grandmother crouches under a kitchen table like a child playing hide and seek. Elevated to a form of rural, primitive architecture, the table becomes a temporary refuge, a hiding place erected as a defence against an invisible threat. CASA [HOME] presents an image suspended between affection and anguish. Conveying a sense of immediacy, the image captures the complexities of the long journey from childhood to old age, and back, as well as the interplay between subject and artist, an ageing grandmother and a young grandson coming of age.

In this photograph from 2006, Maloberti clings precariously to a road sign marking the entrance to Casalpusterlengo. The artist’s unsustainable athletic effort reveals attachment to his hometown and a deep devotion to his sociocultural roots, while also hinting at the inevitability of detachment. Maloberti kept the sign at home for nearly twenty years. Today, he presents it at PAC almost as if it were an archaeological find: KASALPUSTERLENGO (with a “K” like Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s “Karpi”) is a fragment, a piece of himself he cannot let go of.

The performance titled LA SUGGERITRICE [THE PROMPTER] takes place throughout the exhibition space on weekends. The performer whispers a single sentence into the ears of visitors. The words are taken from a lecture by Carmelo Bene (1937–2002) on Plato: “Nella tasca destra l’Oriente, nella tasca sinistra l’Occidente” [In the right pocket, the Orient; in the left pocket, the Occident]. Evoked almost as if it were an oracle, the phrase represents an unstoppable migratory flow from one body to another, highlighting the need to cross cultural boundaries that separate one population from another. The performer acts as a mediator and voice-bearer, making the audience an integral and active part of the performance.