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.

Lucia Veronesi, La desinenza estinta, 2024, Tessuto jacquard effetto lampasso di trame, 300 x 500 cm. Installation view, Ca’ Pesaro Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, Venezia. ph. Francesco Allegretto

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.

Cyril De Commarque, O2, 2019. Saatchi Gallery, London 2019. Ph Studio Cyril De Commarque

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.