Blog | COMBAT ART REVIEW

UNIQUE and Massimo Alba present Pau Aguiló

On the occasion of Milan Design Week 2026, the project dedicated to the promotion of young artists conceived by Bruno Gnocchi meets Massimo Alba, a leading name in the world of fashion, giving rise to an exhibition that brings different practices and sensibilities into dialogue, in an intimate exchange between visual researches.

On the occasion of Milan Design Week 2026, UNIQUE, a project dedicated to the promotion of young artists and conceived by Bruno Gnocchi, launches a new collaboration with Massimo Alba, a distinctive voice in Milanese fashion, long attentive to the relationship between art, material, and clothing, to present an exhibition by the young Spanish artist Pau Aguiló (Palma, 2002).

The project confirms UNIQUE’s ability to generate connections between different languages and contexts, with the aim of supporting and giving visibility to emerging practices.

Within Massimo Alba’s Milan showroom, UNIQUE invites Aguiló to present a selection of paintings, building a measured dialogue between artistic research, textile surface, and brand identity. The intervention fits within the project’s broader vision, aimed at supporting voices capable of inhabiting hybrid spaces and activating forms of exchange.

Trained in Fine Arts at Camberwell College of Arts in London, Pau Aguiló has developed a distinctive painterly language in which imagination, memory, and a sense of place are interwoven. His works create a tension between inner and outer dimensions, nourished by the landscapes that have shaped his trajectory: from the forests of Mallorca to the urban fabric of London.

The collaboration between UNIQUE and Massimo Alba stems from a shared vision in which art and clothing are not conceived as finished objects, but as open processes, capable of absorbing time, traces, and narratives. During Milan Design Week, the showroom takes shape as a suspended space between domestic setting, atelier, and artist’s studio, where paintings, garments, and different materials coexist in a carefully balanced dialogue.

For UNIQUE, this project marks a further step in consolidating a platform able to connect different disciplines, fostering exchanges between artists, brands, and audiences. Pau Aguiló’s intervention at Massimo Alba’s showroom embodies this tension with precision, unfolding as an experience in which the artistic work enters into relation with its context, expanding its field of meaning.

ERWIN WURM - Dreamers. The exhibition at the Fortuny Museum

Fortuny Museum presents a major monographic exhibition dedicated to Erwin Wurm (Bruck an der Mur, Austria, 1954), one of the most influential contemporary artists. Over the course of his career, Wurm has profoundly rethought the very concept of sculpture: expanding notions of time, mass, and surface, abstraction and representation, while placing the body and the everyday object at the center of a reflection that transcends traditional boundaries between art and life.

Humor, a fundamental tool in his practice, opens onto philosophical and social questions: Wurm stages the tensions of contemporary society, criticizing the pressures of capitalism and externally imposed constructions of identity. The liminal space between “high” and “low,” between the monumental and the banal, becomes the privileged territory of a farcical and paradoxical reality. As Erwin Wurm states, “The ordinary is so close and so familiar to us that we are inclined to overlook it. Looking at the ordinary from the perspective of the absurd and the paradox gives us the opportunity to see something different, perhaps more interesting.”

Welcoming his work into the rooms of Museo Fortuny means accepting a double challenge to gravity: the physical one, which governs volumes and masses, and the historical one, exercised by the cultural stratification of one of the city’s most memory-laden places.

After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts and the School of Applied Arts in Vienna between the late 1970s and early 1980s, Wurm gained international recognition with the celebrated One Minute Sculptures (1996–97), presented on the second floor of the museum, where visitors can directly interact with them. In these works, the artist provides instructions inviting the public to perform actions or poses with everyday objects—furniture, chairs, bottles, books, sweaters—transforming the human body into a temporary sculpture. The work is by nature ephemeral: it exists in the gesture, in the duration of one minute, and survives through photographic documentation, often produced using the instant medium of Polaroid, a true “taxidermy of the instant.”

At the same time, Wurm anthropomorphizes common objects in unexpected ways, as in the Dreamers works, in which oversized cushions supported by human limbs—legs, arms, feet—in often awkward or precarious positions become metaphors for the dream world, exploring the tension between the physical body and the psychological dimension of the unconscious.

Within the museum, the dialogue focuses in particular on clothing as a sculptural extension of the body. In the Substitutes series, Wurm presents garments devoid of the human figure, monuments to absence or membranes that retain the final gesture of those who inhabited them. The analogy is with Fortuny’s Delphos, a shell ready to receive the body, yet lacking autonomous structure without it. An emblematic comparison emerges between Fortuny’s Knossos shawl and the sculpture Yikes, simple rectangles of material that acquire meaning only in relation to the person. Knossos is an “open” scenic device, requiring a creative gesture in order to become a living sculpture; Yikes, by contrast, freezes the instant in which that gesture has just dissolved. In both cases, the work exists in the time of action, on the threshold between presence and absence.

In these terms, the eccentric dialogue with Mariano Fortuny takes shape: a polymathic genius—stage designer, inventor, painter, and designer—Fortuny transformed Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei into a total laboratory, where light, architecture, and textile merged into a unified work of art. Museo Fortuny today takes the form of a true physical “semiosphere”: an environment in which heterogeneous texts, forms, and memories collide, generating new explosions of meaning.

To enter Palazzo Fortuny during this exhibition, in particular, means immersing oneself in a living architectural organism, a sensitive membrane where objects and container engage in a continuous exchange. Wurm’s work enters this palimpsest as an element of controlled destabilization: his sculptures bend, swell, and contract under the weight of thought and irony, transforming the museum into a laboratory of contemporary identity. Yesterday, as today.

In this encounter between the solidity of the past and the precariousness of the present, a crucial question emerges: in a world in which we are constantly called upon to “give ourselves a form,” what remains of us when the pose dissolves?

The exhibition invites the public to engage with this tension, recognizing in the human being itself the ultimate plastic material.

Erica Ravenna Gallery presents "Materia Madre/Lingua Madre"

On May 12, the Erica Ravenna Gallery inaugurates its second exhibition of 2026, continuing the exploration of landscape and nature initiated with the recently concluded show by Vincenzo Agnetti.

The exhibition project Materia Madre / Lingua Madre, curated by Benedetta Carpi De Resmini, stems from a reflection on matter as a primary and generative element—the matrix of the living—and on language as a continuous process of translation and transformation. The exhibition unfolds as a landscape in flux: a sensitive territory in which nature is neither backdrop nor mere object of representation, but an active presence—a force that changes, breathes, resists, and regenerates.

The invited artists—Cyril de Commarque, Laura Pugno, Gaia Scaramella, and Lucia Veronesi—interweave their practices like underground root systems, moving through matter, sign, gesture, and symbol. Despite the diversity of their languages, their works share a common tension: to question the unstable boundary between the organic and the cultural, between what grows spontaneously and what is constructed, named, and controlled.

As the curator states: “matter becomes narrative, myth settles into surfaces, the sign germinates like a seed. The works emerge from processes of continuous metamorphosis, in which the living takes on symbolic form and language, in turn, becomes body, substance, trace. Within this horizon, human and non-human do not oppose each other, but enter into a relationship of mutual listening. Language does not describe nature from the outside: it follows its rhythms, embraces its instability, reflects its transformations. Metamorphosis thus becomes a relational practice, a critical stance capable of recognizing uncertainty as a fertile condition.

The exhibition presents itself as an ecosystem of mutations: a space where forms, words, and images continuously disintegrate and recombine, while nature incessantly rewrites its own grammar. Transformation is not merely a poetic imaginary, but an ecological principle: adaptation, regeneration, persistence. From this perspective, language too reveals itself as living matter, capable of contributing to the construction of new alliances between human beings and the environment. The ‘mother tongue’ evoked in the title does not coincide with a closed identity or exclusive belonging: rather, it is an original and pre-verbal language—formless and shared—preceding codified speech, belonging to the body, to breath, to relation. A common language, rooted in our ‘mother matter.’”

The exhibition opens with works on paper and a wooden sculpture by Cyril de Commarque. In his practice, environmental data, natural traces, and pre-human visions translate into sculptural forms and essential images that make often invisible processes perceptible. Wood, a material never neutral, carries within it the memory of the territories from which it originates. The bulbous, anthropomorphic, and generative forms in his works on paper—traversed by roots and germinations—evoke primordial ecosystems and new possibilities of life in the age of the Anthropocene.

The exhibition continues with works by Laura Pugno from the series Persuasioni. Created using sand as a pictorial material, they arise from an investigation into coastal plants and the fragile balance between permanence and dispersion. Sand, essential to the life of the depicted species, escapes control and reveals the precariousness of any human attempt to dominate nature. The reference is the Venetian coastline along the Adriatic and Bibione, a territory profoundly transformed by tourist-driven anthropization and continuous beach nourishment interventions. In Pugno’s work, natural matter retains its autonomy: water shapes, sediments, leaves traces. The work emerges from a dialogue with ecological processes, not from an act of control.

The exhibition proceeds with works by Lucia Veronesi, including The plants you kill are doing quite well, in which the artist restores visibility to species believed extinct and re-emerged under new taxonomies. Through monotypes and embroidery, scientific language transforms into a poetic lexicon, generating a new vegetal vocabulary. More broadly, her practice engages with what disappears—forms, species, words, memories—constructing a fragile grammar in which extinction appears not only as a biological phenomenon, but also as a symbolic and cultural loss.

Finally, the exhibition concludes with works by Gaia Scaramella. For the artist, matter plays a central role: surfaces, objects, and images are transformed through processes that create short circuits between irony, vulnerability, and social critique. Matter is never merely a support, but a living organism and relational space, capable of bringing into tension the natural and the artificial, care and constraint, desire and collapse. In the series Matribus, small anthropomorphic figures emerge from glossy, serial ceramic elements, suspended between birth and fall. The artist constructs a micro-community of fragile beings seeking support in ambiguous structures: nest, design object, womb, device. An allegory of the contemporary condition, in which what protects can also constrain, and every form of dependence reveals both vulnerability and the possibility of relation.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue featuring a critical text by Benedetta Carpi De Resmini and poems by Valerio Magrelli.

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