Stone and Coral at Candy Snake Gallery, Milan – A Dual Exhibition by Diego Azzola and Gloria Tomasini

From October 22 to November 22, 2025, Candy Snake Gallery in Milan presents Stone and Coral, a dual solo exhibition by Diego Azzola and Gloria Tomasini.

Gloria Tomasini, Milk Bruise II, 2025

The project creates a dialogue between the two young artists through a shared fascination with aquatic worlds. The details of stone fountain statues represented in Azzola’s paintings encounter the complex coral congregations modeled in ceramic by Tomasini, forming an interplay between solidity and metamorphosis, stillness and vitality.

Stone and Coral Candy Snake Gallery invites viewers into an environment where natural and artificial merge, and where matter itself becomes a living, evolving entity.

Diego Azzola (Bergamo, 2000) graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti G. Carrara in Bergamo, completing his master’s degree in painting in 2025. His practice centers on a primal, vital amalgam—creation and destruction, assembly and disintegration—as the fundamental premise of his work. At the heart of his research lies the potential to generate new forms of life and to merge elements from contrasting realms. Through painting, installation, and sculpture, he explores the space between the natural and the artificial, searching for new hybrids and ambiguous identities that challenge the boundaries of life and individuality.

Gloria Tomasini (Lugano, 1999) is a Swiss-Croatian visual artist. She graduated from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan in 2022 and currently lives in Zurich, where she is pursuing a Master’s in Fine Arts at ZHdK. Her artistic process is rooted in manual craftsmanship and a meditative relationship with materials. Modeling becomes for her an introspective act, an entry into a suspended, timeless space where imagination and physical gesture intertwine.

Diego Azzola, Dolomia, 2025

Through delicate organic forms and detailed textures, Tomasini explores a tactile and sensorial perception of nature. Her ceramic works evoke microcosms—small ecosystems where fragility and resilience coexist, and where the material itself becomes experience.

Together, Azzola and Tomasini compose a poetic and subaquatic landscape, where artistic gesture follows the slow rhythm of natural transformation. In the rooms of Candy Snake Gallery, painting and sculpture converge in a suspended dialogue that invites viewers to immerse themselves in a fluid world of silent presences and continuous change.

The exhibition opens on Wednesday, October 22, 2025, from 6:30 to 9:00 p.m., at Candy Snake Gallery, Via degli Orombelli 15, Milan.

Candy Snake Gallery

Milano

Date 22 ottobre 2025  - 22 novembre 2025

Apparitions by Carlo Alberto Rastelli: in Imola, painting that stretches time

Saturday, October 18 at 6 p.m., marks the opening of Apparitions Carlo Alberto Rastelli at Il Pomo da DaMo Gallery in Imola. On view are “constellated” portraits, veined wooden surfaces, and landscapes from another dimension. The artist, a finalist at both the Premio Combat and Premio Cairo, presents a body of work that expands perception, where abstraction and reality blur and shift.

Carlo Alberto Rastelli, Doctor Who

The solo exhibition Apparitions—curated by Francesca Baboni and Stefano Taddei—questions the act of seeing itself. The real and the abstract touch, overlap, and sometimes deny one another, leaving behind a web of clues rather than a linear narrative.

Rastelli — finalist of both the Premio Combat and Premio Cairo — brings visual memory and the present into tension. His works draw upon photographic archives and historical imagery, renewed through a layered painterly practice: iridescent acrylics, stencils, and even masking tape are used to modulate surfaces, while fir wood panels reveal their natural veins like a seismograph of time.

In his group portraits, the human face is never stable; it dissolves into constellations, opening to metamorphoses that suggest a humanity in transit — restless within its temporal and spatial limits. Elsewhere, figures are obscured: galaxies and “black holes” veil their features and anatomies — as in the emblematic portrait of Andrea Costa, the Imola-born figure who traversed anarchism and socialism. Pastel hues merge with dark backgrounds and Romantic echoes: in the landscapes, one perceives traces of Böcklin and Turner, specters of an insistent memory.

The canvas series Pet Sematary — a declared homage to Stephen King — shifts the focus toward landscape. Latvian forests observed from life are populated by crosses and skulls, activated through dripping and chromatic bursts that suppress the human figure until it vanishes. The result is a perceptual slippage: a nearby elsewhere, almost within reach, where reference becomes uncertain and every image seems to arrive from an unaligned time.

Carlo Alberto Rastelli, Ein Handschuh Pittura

“Reality and abstraction blend in a suspended narrative, resistant to any univocal reading,” explain curators Francesca Baboni and Stefano Taddei. “Faces and groups turn into constellations: humanity appears to yearn for transcendence, to overcome its limits,” they add.

Rather than illustrating reality, Apparitions destabilizes it: painting becomes a space of unstable translation, where images emerge as traces and sediments rather than as completed figures. An invitation to look longer — against the haste of the present.

Il Pomo da DaMo Contemporary Art

Imola

Date 18 ottobre 2025 – 8 febbraio 2026

Premio Lissone 2025: New Edition at the Museum of Contemporary Art

The Premio Lissone 2025 has been announced — the historic biennial event dedicated to painting, which continues to stand out as one of the most significant formats in the Italian contemporary art scene.

Premio Lissone 2025 A cura di A cura di Lorenzo Balbi, Hanne Mugaas, Stefano Raimondi

Realized with the support of Regione Lombardia as part of the Avviso Unico 2025, this year’s edition also celebrates the 25th anniversary of the opening of the MAC – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Lissone – presenting a renewed and international outlook.

Under the artistic direction of Stefano Raimondi, the new format of the Lissone Prize takes shape as a large-scale exhibition spread across all three floors of the museum, where the works of six Italian and international artists engage in an open dialogue of exchange and research. One work by each artist will be acquired and added to the MAC’s permanent collection.

The curators of the Lissone Prize 2025 are three prominent figures from the international contemporary art scene: Lorenzo Balbi, Director of MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art of Bologna, who has invited Viola Leddi and Valerio Nicolai; Hanne Mugaas, Director of Kunsthall Stavanger and Head of Programme at OCA – Office for Contemporary Art Norway, who has selected Cecilia Granara and Giuliana Rosso; and Stefano Raimondi, Director of the MAC, who has chosen Landon Metz and Ariel Schlesinger.

“I have never seen art as a competition but as a dialogue,” remarks Raimondi. “The concept of a prize where one artist ‘wins’ feels distant from the spirit of our time. This edition aims to celebrate collaboration and the exchange of ideas as the founding values of the contemporary artistic community.”

Valerio Nicolai, Lo Scolone, 2020

The selection of artists — all born between the 1980s and 1990s — reflects the original spirit of the historic Lissone Prize, when emerging talents brought the energy of their research into a shared space for debate and growth. “It is highly significant,” notes Mayor Laura Borella, “that all invited artists belong to a generation capable of renewing the gaze on painting, in continuity with the tradition and spirit of the museum’s collections.”

Carolina Minotti, Councillor for Culture, highlights how the Prize regains its international dimension, fostering dialogue between European institutions and Italian artists working abroad, in a continuous exchange of perspectives and artistic languages.

Founded in 1946, the Lissone Prize was one of Italy’s earliest and most prestigious awards dedicated to painting, marking an important chapter in the history of national contemporary art. After historic editions featuring artists such as Afro, Vedova, Turcato, and Morlotti, the Prize was re-established in 1999 and made biennial in 2006, alternating with the Lissone Design Prize.

Giuliana Rosso, La galassia di Andromeda, 2019

Today, with its 2025 edition, the MAC reaffirms its mission to build bridges between generations and geographies, transforming the Lissone Prize from a competition into a platform for dialogue and reflection on the present state of painting.

MAC Museo d'Arte Contemporanea

Lissone

Date 19 ottobre 2025 – 18 gennaio 2026