Alessandro Di Pietro | in The Bakery: La Vita Agra

Annet Gelink Gallery is proud to present the first exhibition by Alessandro Di Pietro at the gallery, hosted in The Bakery, in collaboration with Case Chiuse by Paola Clerico. Featuring new sculptures and a drawing, the exhibition La Vita Agra is developed around the artist's ongoing investigation into impact and transformation, dwelling on the moment before rupture: that charged instant when something irreversible is about to occur. Between desire and collision, the exhibition explores where anticipation meets the commodification of chaos.

La Vita Agra1 is an exhibition about gravity — not only the physical kind, but the more ordinary gravity of necessity: what falls, what breaks, what keeps working while everything around it gives way. The show does not celebrate catastrophe; it asks whether there is still a moment, before impact, in which something can be done.

Fade Paw Study (Untitled) (2023) belongs to the Fade Paw Studies series and to the Rotten Futurism cycle. A feline paw, multiplied, seems to hurtle toward a point of impact we cannot see. The animal form turns mineral — corroded, charred. Movement no longer promises anything: Umberto Boccioni and Futurist sculpture are still present, but the old thrill of speed is gone. Instead of racing forward, the future falls.

To Play Dumb II (2026) shows what comes after. A bowling ball drops onto the fragments of other sculptures — a swan, a mouse, a cat, rings, pipes — and shatters them. The bronze cracks, chars, melts. Out of the wreckage, a new form emerges.

The two works stand on opposite sides of the same event. One comes before the crash, the other holds what's left of it. The first still carries the possibility of intervening; the second is already a relic. In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil2 defines gravity as the law of necessity, and grace as its suspension. The relic no longer falls — but it never stops weighing.

Suspended, finally, is No Still (2026), the last work on the wall. The colored-pencil drawing draws on the tradition of seventeenth-century Flemish still life — stilleven, in Dutch — depicting a nature that is not yet entirely dead. Its forms barely move; their edges blur. It is an image caught in suspension, never quite in focus, hinting at a residue of movement with no place in time. Whether it belongs to the "before" or the "after" hardly matters — it is alive. An alternate ending to the story of La Vita Agra, in which the protagonist's rebellion never quite settles into mere work.

No Still

It's the crashes, the blasts, the collisions that change your life.

It's the wrecks that tear open a void

and cut you off, for good, from who you were before.

Think of that electric shiver behind your ears

when something deeply unsettling is about to happen.

Do you want it to finally arrive, or

would you rather stay in the dark, and forget that you always knew?

You know you want it.

Wilted, instead, is the fetish of self-realization.

Comets, an instant before they crash into your face,

are beautiful.