Galleria Michela Rizzo is pleased to announce the exhibition black with love, intact as a flower which will open on 17 February 2024. The exhibition, curated by Övül Ö. Durmusoglu, will present the works of Ruben Montini and Nazim Ünal Yılmaz with the participation of Sharon Hayes.

black with love, intact as a flower is an artistic conversation on variations to exercise transgressive and iconoclastic poetics of the queer today as a way of stepping ahead the current divisive and far right leaning populism. The conversation between the paintings of Nazim Ünal Yılmaz and performative installations of Ruben Montini with a special appearance by Sharon Hayes is about different ways of understanding opacity, vulnerability and sincerity of desire as a political force facing societal hypocrisies. The title of the exhibition comes from an early poem by Pier Paolo Pasolini ‘Dansa di Narcìs’ (Narcissus Dancing) - originally written in Friulian dialect - expressing a deep archaic contamination with love and desire to search for a poetics of self-reality. Pasolini’s words and images are formally and thematically connected with ‘a certain way of feeling something’ to analyse everyday fascism and make it more visible. Because he understood life as a force that can express itself alone with itself, he expressed himself with examples and threw his body into the struggle (‘Poet of Ashes’, 1966).

The satirical figuration in Nazim Ünal Yılmaz’s paintings allow him to approach reality as part of the same edifice with art similar to Pasolini’s understanding of avantgarde. For Yılmaz queer is an exercise of a transgressive opacity that shatters the fictitious construction of identity as a branding mechanism and neoliberal product. Ruben Montini searches to vocalise LGBTQIA+ struggle in words, colours and textures; he plays with the linguistic game of articulation in order to reveal and transform the violence hidden in everyday expressions. Every attempt of self portrait connects to a community portrait that demands fluidity. Both artists black with love, facing society with their desire for a new kind of justice, ask for an agency of civic poetry while Sharon Hayes take the unspoken questions to the common ground as Pasolini did in his ‘Comizi d’Amore’ (Love Conversations, 1964), confronting societal prejudices, taboos and incoherences with her questions in her first film of ongoing ‘ricerche’ series, ‘ricerche : three’ (2013) which debuted in 2013 at 55th edition of Venice Biennale, ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’.

black with love, intact as a flower is an invitation to imagine together another world within the one we live in; to imagine something new, like love, like beauty, like equality, like justice.

Critical text by Övül Ö. Durmusoglu.

In the exhibition there are works from Ruben Montini's Altarpieces series created in collaboration with the students from the Royal School of Needlework in London.