Dear Anish, dear Giulio,

this is, respectively, your sixth and seventh solo exhibition presented at the gallery.
It therefore came naturally to ask you for a meeting in the space that had seen you separately as protagonists.
Your two opposing attitudes are now recomposed here.
Not only the works will be exhibited side by side, but also the artists themselves, who will attend the vernissage in person.

With this encounter we will be celebrating both the 50^th anniversary of Galleria Minini and Brescia’s status as Capital of Culture for 2023.

We will be talking either about forms, cultures, meaningful contents, as in Anish’s works, or about absence, as in Giulio’s ones, where full spaces and empty spaces meet to create a suspended dimension, a space in between today and tomorrow, between a past and a future being condensed into the present.

Giulio, you thought that a number of works could well merge into a single one, a tribute to the gallery (but also to the gallerist).
The artist gazes at the space and believes the gallery goes beyond its walls: the gallery is mainly inside our heads and, therefore, in our intentions.

Anish, you start instead from a vitalist principle, full of life, where thought can materialize in different forms and in different ways.
If I observe that small black triangle filling a top corner of the room, an important geometric shape like the Pythagorean-Euclidean triangle, something that reminds us of the sum of squares built on the sides….then, I think of maths, of geometry, of the discovery of the universe, of the foundation of a new world, of reason, surely, but side by side with emotion and sentiment, shying away from any sentimentality.

The dichotomy that I am talking about, from white to black, from everything to nothing, from fullness to emptiness, is not a contrast; it is the sum of two extreme, basic positions which do not exclude each other but merge into one, creating a new status.

There, I was asked why on earth I was so foolhardy as to invite you to have a dual exhibition. Thanks very much for agreeing to it and for having done so with a great sense of reciprocal curiosity.
The result is that, on this occasion, the different positions do not mean a rift, but a co-creation: the white work, completely empty, and the black work, which encircles all the colours until they blend into the most absolute black, are like a supernova or a black hole. The former passes onto the viewer its dense load of light and thought, while the latter holds onto the energy that the author has stored into it.
In both cases the works are a source of thought which convey concepts and meanings from the artist to the spectator and vice versa, from today to tomorrow, from order to disorder.
In this sense, Giulio, I quote one of your statements that says it is the work that looks at us, and not the other way around.