“Les bonbons cruels”: Agostino Rocco at Candy Snake Gallery

Agostino Rocco brings a new meditation on contemporary painting to the Candy Snake Gallery with Les bonbons cruels, on view from November 26, 2025 to January 3, 2026.

Agostino Rocco, Lemony Cathy, 2025,

The artist—known for his ability to make the tradition of portraiture resonate with today’s most ambiguous and digital visual culture—presents a series of new works accompanied by a critical text by Andrea Contin. The opening is scheduled for Wednesday, November 26 at 6:30 pm in the gallery’s Milan space on Via degli Orombelli.

With this new solo exhibition, Rocco continues a long-standing path that traverses the history of painting in order to reinvent it from within. In his works, the echo of the Flemish masters—from van Eyck to Holbein—is never a mere citation, but a fertile ground for questioning the very nature of the image. As Contin notes, Rocco seems to carry on an ideal conversation with those great painters, pushing painting into a realm where beauty and disturbance meet.

The portraits in Les bonbons cruels embody this tension with striking clarity. These faces do not exist; they are generated from an imaginary that draws on the aesthetics of artificial intelligence without ever surrendering fully to it. They are familiar yet unreadable—“icons without identity”—suspended in a dimension that escapes the boundaries of the real and the unreal. Their polished perfection, heightened by masterfully calibrated light and an invisible brushstroke, produces an emotional short circuit: the viewer feels both attracted and unsettled, as if confronted with a presence that watches us without truly being there.

The strength of Rocco’s work lies precisely in this play of mirrors between seduction and unease. Each painting is the result of a slow, layered process in which drawing, chiaroscuro, and thin oil glazes recreate by hand the cold immediacy of the digital. It is an act of total control—what the artist himself describes as an “existential apnea”: a deep immersion in the gesture of painting, where technique and thought become indistinguishable.

Self-taught and born in 1971, Rocco has built over the years a sophisticated and unmistakable visual language, capable of merging formal rigor with subtle irony. His works have been exhibited in galleries and institutions across Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, Pietrasanta, and Belgium, confirming a coherent and ever-evolving research.

Candy Snake Gallery

Via degli Orombelli 15, Milano

Date

26 novembre – 3 gennaio 2026

“I Would Like to Stay Here a Little Longer”: Erika Pellicci’s First Solo Exhibition at ME Vannucci

From November 30, 2025 to February 16, 2026, ME Vannucci Gallery presents I Would Like to Stay Here a Little Longer, the first solo exhibition by Erika Pellicci, a young Tuscan artist who in recent years has emerged as one of the most sensitive voices in the new Italian photography scene.

Erika Pellicci, Angela compra le sigarette

Accompanied by a text by Moira Ricci, the exhibition brings together twenty previously unseen photographs, including three large prints on fabric that expand the material and immersive dimension of her work

Entering the exhibition means crossing a threshold—the threshold of a “guest room,” a metaphor evoked by the artist herself. A place that is familiar yet never truly inhabited, steeped in suspended memories and lingering expectations. A provisional space, halfway between refuge and emotional archive, where silent presences seem to move just beneath the surface, between past and present, between what remains and what slips away.

Pellicci’s images function as discreet invitations: each one asks the viewer to pause, to linger in the intimate territory where the artist situates her own vulnerability. The photographs, crafted with great attention to gesture and the body, become listening spaces—visual thresholds that question the way we dwell, observe, and inevitably confront what is fragile, mutable, human.

Erika Pellicci, Casa di Andria

The practice of Erika Pellicci—born in Barga in 1992 and trained between Florence and Bologna—centers on the idea of the body as a form in transformation. It is a body that inhabits and unravels, acts and withdraws, capable of becoming myth, legend, or simply reality filtered through the gaze. Through photography, video, and performance, Pellicci constructs a layered symbolic language in which the figure—often her own—becomes a medium for exploring the boundary between intimacy and collectivity, belonging and dissolution.

Erika Pellicci, Uno.. due.. the.. STELLA

The exhibition marks a new chapter in a career already enriched by international recognition: from awards won in China to museum projects in Italy and abroad, and most recently the Spada Partners Prize 2024 in Turin. After participating in numerous group exhibitions, Pellicci now arrives at her first solo show at ME Vannucci, where she had previously presented her work on two different occasions.

Galleria ME VANNUCCI

Via Gorizia, 122 Pistoia

Date

30 novembre 2025 - 16 febbraio 2026

Laura Grisi at Galleria P420: “The Endless Diagram” Rewrites the Origins of a Pioneer

With The Endless Diagram, opening on November 29, Galleria P420 dedicates a new in-depth exhibition to Laura Grisi—one that promises to redefine the reading of her work.

Laura Grisi, Senza titolo/Untitled, (1964-65)

Curated by Marco Scotini, the show marks a pivotal chapter in the reconstruction of the artist’s trajectory, thanks to the recent discovery—within the Grisi Archive—of a group of works created between 1961 and 1965 that have never been exhibited until now. This precious core of material allows for a radically new perspective on the early career of an artist long acknowledged as one of the most original figures in Italian art of the late twentieth century.

Long before critics linked her almost exclusively to Italian Pop Art, Laura Grisi (Rhodes, 1939 – Rome, 2017) had already demonstrated an extraordinary ability to absorb and rework the international artistic languages of her time. The works from the early 1960s—now shown again for the first time in sixty years—reveal a surprising synthesis of the consumerist imagery of Pop, optical perception studies, the modular structures of Minimal Art, and the emerging interest in the performative and process-based practices that would later fuel Arte Povera.

This was a moment in which the consumer society was expanding—and simultaneously beginning to crack. Artists oscillated between fascination with modernity and rejection of its alienating drift. Grisi intercepted this dual movement early on: on one side appropriating objects, signs, and images from everyday life; on the other, embedding reflections on the role of the viewer, the relationship between technology and perception, and the possibility of turning the artistic experience into a mental and sensory process.

Laura Grisi, Subway, 1967

P420’s exhibition project places these early works in dialogue with selected pieces from the 1970s, the period in which Grisi developed her Natural Elements series—installations that artificially reproduce atmospheric phenomena such as rain, wind, or shifting sand. Here, nature is not merely imitated but recreated as a perceptual, mental, and technological device: an approach that unmistakably defines the uniqueness of her practice, always suspended between science and sensation, between artifice and archetype.

The Endless Diagram is therefore not simply a retrospective, but a critical act of recomposition. P420 continues its long-term commitment to rediscovering Grisi’s work, offering a complete and multilayered reading of an artistic practice that anticipated many issues central to contemporary discussions: the dematerialization of the image, the relationship between technology and nature, and the immersive dimension of artistic experience.

Laura Grisi, Seascape, 1966

Sixty years after her earliest exhibitions, the force of Laura Grisi’s work feels more relevant than ever: an endless diagram capable of renewing itself continuously and restoring to art its vocation to question—and transform—the real.

P420

Via Azzo Gardino, 9, 40122 Bologna

Date

29 novembre 2025 - 24 gennaio 2026