Io giardino - Solo Show by Andrea Lucchesi at Cremona Art Fair

Io giardino is a painting exhibition born from the observation of the garden as a living, fragile, and ever-changing space. In the works of Andrea Lucchesi, winner of the Premio Prospettive 2025 at Cremona Art Fair, the garden is not merely a natural subject, but a form of thought: a place that humans tend, move through, and organize, without ever being able to fully possess it.

Andrea Lucchesi, Untitled, 2026, Oil on canvas, 40 x 40 cm

The works feature dense surfaces, crossed by marks and layers in which vegetation seems to expand beyond all limits. Colors overlap, forms emerge and dissolve, while recognizable elements—vases, fences, architectural fragments—surface as traces of an order that persists, but does not dominate.

For Lucchesi, the garden is one of the most fragile forms of human intervention: it exists because someone cares for it, yet it already contains within itself the moment when that care will cease. One day the gardener will no longer be there; then the original design will change, some plants will disappear, others will take over, and what was once contained will begin to grow freely.

Lucchesi seems to paint precisely this threshold. Not the garden as a perfect place, but the garden at the moment it begins to slip away. Painting does not describe the garden: it enacts it. In this sense, the garden becomes a metaphor for painting itself: a process that originates in a gesture, but then grows, changes, and escapes control. The artist’s gesture does not impose a definitive form, but accompanies a transformation.

In this way, the garden also becomes a metaphor for limit. Everything that arises from care is exposed to change. Every balance is temporary. What is designed can only be maintained for a time, before being transformed by what exceeds control.

Io giardino does not narrate the end of something, but its continuous becoming. It is a space where intention and loss coexist, where painting returns not a closed form, but a condition.

Its strength lies precisely here: in making visible a vitality that cannot be stopped.

Andrea Lucchesi was born in Florence in 1981. After graduating from the Liceo Artistico Leon Battista Alberti, he continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, where he was a student of Professor Adriano Bimbi. In 2004 he won the Tito and Maria Conti Prize, awarded every five years by the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence. In 2013 he founded, together with four other artists, an independent collective based in Florence. He currently lives and works in Arezzo.

Among his main exhibitions: Cosa Viva, A Pick Gallery (Turin, 2025); finalist, Combat Prize, Museo Giovanni Fattori, Granai di Villa Mimbelli (2024); Livorno Open Eyes Signal, group exhibition at Annarumma Gallery, Naples (2023); The Worm at the Core, Woolwich Beresford Street, London (2022); TRITTICO. A reflection on portraiture, Sdrucciolo de Pitti, Florence (2017); Dieci anni nel Mugello, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (2011); Lezioni del male, Galleria delle Arti del Disegno, Piazza S. Marco, Florence (2009); La materia del segno, curated by Francesca Baboni and Stefano Taddei, Angela Memola Grafique Art Gallery, Bologna (2009).