Riccardo Benassi - Morestalgia, curated by Alberto Salvadori

Fondazione ICA Milano presents, from Wednesday, January 25th to Saturday, March 18th 2023, the solo show Morestalgia by Riccardo Benassi (Cremona, 1982), curated by Alberto Salvadori.

The exhibition inaugurates Fondazione ICA Milano's 2023 cultural season and is rooted in Benassi's long standing research, articulating itself within the spaces of the ground floor, where it comes to life as an intimate and personal journey. The exhibition project, designed for the occasion, presents a selection of works on view for the first time in Italy. 

Evoking a nostalgic feeling, Morestalgia unravels through a liquid narrative focused on the central element of language, a fundamental cornerstone of the artist's practice. The exhibition returns personal considerations and reflections, which nevertheless belong to a collective dimension and recall numerous themes that have become commonplace during the pandemic. 

The neologism that entitles the exhibition - morestalgia - refers to a painful feeling characteristic of the postInternet era that not only permeates the exhibition, but also takes up the name of the installation that is its beating heart.

As Riccardo Benassi expalins, "I have called 'morestalgia' a specific type of nostalgia whose pain resembles more that caused by envy than that of real nostalgia. The perception of a painful lack, however, which each of us self-translates to ourselves as loss, whose direct reference is other human beings we esteem and their shared experiences online."

The installation Morestalgia, created by the artist in 2019, uses a LED screen that can be crossed by the human body to build a collective sensory experience centered on the movement of the visitor. By walking through the installation, the audience becomes aware of the presence of their own and other bodies, making themselves participants in a situation created by the artist with this same goal in mind. The mechanism activated by Morestalgia draws a real itinerary by stages in the artistic production of the artist.

Among the works on view there is the English version of the work Daily Desiderio Domestico, whose Italian iteration has been permanently exhibited in the spaces of #fondazioneicamilano since 2019. The LED screen receives and transmits a daily message, visible for only twenty-four hours and aimed at conveying the phantasmal presence of the artist making the text. Benassi also introduces a reflection on artificial intelligence and the automation of creativity, articulated through the video recording of a small robot as it paints the artist's childhood landscapes.

Oscillating between unstable images and textual narratives, the exhibition invites the public to explore the boundaries of an increasingly labile individual freedom, constantly threatened by the monitoring and control mechanisms that dominate the virtual environment so powerfully that they sometimes trespass into the space of the real.

At the same time, #fondazioneicamilano launches its 2023 programming with the solo exhibition An impression that may possibly last forever by Kenyan artist Chemutai Ng'ok. The exhibition, curated by Chiara Nuzzi, is open to the public from January 25th to March 18th, 2023.

We would like to thank Banca Intesa Sanpaolo, official sponsor of the institution, for supporting the programming and activities of ICA Milan.