Nuova Galleria Morone presents questo silenzio intorno (This Silence Around), a project by Domenico Grenci with Eugenia Delbue.
The exhibition takes shape around an investigation of portraiture that unfolds through a concrete and ongoing relationship between the one who depicts and the one who poses. The project makes visible a correspondence between painter and model, between an active gaze and a received gaze, calling into question the unidirectional nature of representation and asking who, within the process, ultimately describes whom.
Beginning in January 2025, Domenico Grenci and Eugenia Delbue meet in the studio and in outdoor settings to give form to a process grounded in attention, listening, and presence. During long sessions of stillness, Delbue poses while Grenci portrays her face from life. The repetition of this gesture generates a slow and shared practice in which time becomes a constitutive element of the work.
This exercise gives rise to a constellation of drawings and paintings, each oriented toward likeness understood as the filigree of a human and pictorial vertigo, rather than as mere formal accuracy. Alongside the drawings and paintings, other traces of the process endure: the diary written by Delbue immediately after each sitting, in which writing crystallizes inner images, epidermal sensations, and sensory perceptions experienced during prolonged stillness; and fixed-camera video recordings that document the moment of posing, forming an archive of faces suspended in an illusory stasis.
The exhibition design suggests a sense of density: a mosaic of painterly works interweaves with video, audio, drawings, and preparatory studies, constructing a layered and immersive environment. The exhibition invites visitors to enter a quiet dimension in which gesture becomes intimate, the pose acquires meaning, and painting becomes an act of naming.
Within the presented body of work, the recurrence of the figure and the insistence of the gesture that brought it into being seem to address the viewer directly, establishing a form of intimacy that exceeds reflection on the medium itself. Inscribed within the historical tradition of posing from life, This Silence Around positions itself in opposition to the progressive disappearance of the portrayed subject’s individuality, adopting instead a shared practice based on extended time and reciprocity—one capable of suspending habitual conceptions of painter and model.