Nashira Gallery is pleased to present Merzbau Quantico, the solo exhibition by LETIA – Letizia Cariello, which will open on Saturday, April 5th, from 9:30 AM to 12:00 PM, and will be accompanied by a critical text by Caroline Corbetta.

With her first solo exhibition at Nashira, LETIA – Letizia Cariello develops and deepens the language and central themes of her research, now consolidated after more than twenty years of activity. The large installation, which gathers and integrates for the first time all the fundamental elements of her artistic vocabulary – from Calendars to Gates, from photographic research to red ropes and maritime bollards – revisits and enriches the themes explored in her recent exhibitions: the immersive installation at the Grande Miglio in Brescia and the site-specific intervention at the Made in Cloister Foundation in Naples.

Come la stessa LETIA afferma, Merzbau Quantico non solo si collega al titolo implicito, che richiama la costruzione per strati attorno all’abitare del corpo inaugurata da Kurt Schwitters, ma si lega anche all’esplorazione della quarta dimensione proposta dalla fisica quantistica. Viene in particolare enfatizzato il riferimento al mondo naturale, che l’artista definisce una “Nuova Narnia”, o meglio, una “Narnia Quantica”, in cui la natura, con elementi vegetali cuciti alle corde rosse e bucrani o rami di bronzo, viene reinterpretata attraverso il filtro dell’artista. Quest’ultima si presenta come un essere umano che è parte integrante della Natura, oltre ogni declinazione primitivista, con tutto ciò che il pensiero umano comporta. Un umano che assorbe, digerisce e ridisegna la natura attraverso il mondo sottile e interiore che ci definisce come esseri pensanti e simbolizzanti. Le presenze, rielaborate in visioni, appaiono attraverso l’intreccio delle corde, che percorrono e ridisegnano l’intero spazio della galleria, integrandolo come elemento attivo di un’opera immersiva unica. Gates e Calendari, intravisti tra palme dorate, invitano i visitatori a muoversi nello spazio per percepire meglio, passando così dal ruolo di osservatori esterni a partecipanti attivi in una visione condivisa.

On the occasion of the exhibition, here is the critical text written by Caroline Corbetta:

In Daunbailò, the indie comedy directed by Jim Jarmusch in the 1980s, Roberto Benigni, playing the role of an imprisoned Italian tourist, draws a window on the wall under the skeptical gaze of his cellmate. An act as absurd as it is necessary. Not a childish attempt to escape prison, but an imaginative gesture that transcends space-time limitations. Like Lucio Fontana, when he surgically slashed his canvases, discovering the Universe. Or Kazimir Malevich, who, around the time of the October Revolution, said things like “I put all the colors in the bag and tied a knot: here is the free white abyss, the infinite, it is before us.” In this sense, his squares are not tautological signs, precursors of conceptual art, but gateways opened onto the beyond. Just like the wardrobe in The Chronicles of Narnia, which leads the young protagonists into another dimension. These are just a few of the many references that Letizia Cariello, known as LETIA, quotes and inspires through her exhibition Merzbau Quantico. Visual art and quantum physics. Imagination and intuition. Tools that expand perception, revealing energy beyond appearances. Nothing is as it seems. This has been told to us by scientists for nearly a century and by artists for many centuries. Drawing windows where there are walls is by no means trivial; it is a challenge to the conventional—and restrictive—perception of reality. With her exhibition, LETIA takes us through an ontological path that attempts this breakthrough toward a hyperreality where spirit and matter are on the same plane, intertwined. Merzbau Quantico is the installation that gives the exhibition its title and serves as its threshold. With red ropes (a distinctive color of her artistic action), the artist reconfigures both space and time. By entering it, you stop seeing and begin, at last, to glimpse: to see through, to see beyond, to intuit the truth, to imagine and even predict, to have the intuition of future things. “Imagination of the present and the future: I sometimes experience it in front of certain facts that are novels, music, environments, drawings, and works of all kinds that live in a condition not subject to the linear conception of time that we drag behind us like a ridiculous certainty,” wrote LETIA a couple of years ago. In this timeless dimension of Merzbau Quantico, some Gates are glimpsed—miniature organic architectures inspired by the order of Nature, boundary surfaces between outside and inside—and Calendars that move forward and backward in days, months, years, rewinding personal and collective time in order to pass through it, while we acquire the awareness that we are here, now. But also other portals painted directly onto the walls, which cannot be disconnected from Malevich’s squares or Benigni’s window. And, of course, the Merzbau are referenced—total works of art created by the German artist Kurt Schwitters starting in the 1920s. Spaces within spaces, dimensions within other dimensions. Pieces of personal and collective memories that layer and connect with an order that only seems random. A deconstruction of the linear concept of time in favor of simultaneity, which quantum physics would later demonstrate to be the true reality. The works of LETIA are tools that help us correct and expand our perspective on everything, because “everything that lives around us has a visual and narrative charge,” and in this “everything,” they help us find the fissures through which we can make true mental and spiritual crossings. Cariello is not afraid to speak of spirituality. But she is keen to make distinctions for the more distracted: it is not about esotericism, new age, nor piety. “We are all connected. Not from a moralistic and charitable point of view, but really because it is a physical law that governs the universe,” she declares without hesitation, she who deeply studies the lives of saints but calls them by name (“so I honor their identity, which is divinity, just as it is for each of us”), the theories of Einstein, and those of the Theosophists. She who even dares to do elegant things. Specifically, it is about harmony, that is, a dynamic balance resulting from a continuous tension of forces under a controlled appearance. For those who can intra-see them, beyond the polished and seductive surfaces, many vital energies, even painful ones, are bubbling up. The works of Letizia Cariello, a descendant of a family of sculptors by profession for two hundred years, are also imbued with dry humor, as in the case of the wall sculpture Il Re Bucranio—a white lacquered deer’s head crowned with a golden cardboard ring taken from a cake box—which offers a sharp comment on the vanity of power. At times, beyond appearances, they are even ruthless. Like the petals of roses photographed and sewn with small cross-stitches of red thread, an infinite sequence of crucifixions. Or covered in dots, also embroidered in red, which are “like seismographs or electrocardiograms of the spirit.” Let’s allow the artist to speak again, as she clarifies the reasons for the choice of the name LETIA, shedding light on many things while leaving the enigma of art and life intact: “This name marks a shift in energetic state that manifested only as an unusual perception of unity between inner and outer space and brought a sense of physical belonging different to existence. As if I realized I was moving with an enhanced perception. Or, rather, surrounded by existence that was much more generous and expansive, completely deaf to any beggarly mode. The consequence, on one hand, was an immediate cleansing of work and labor, and on the other, the total exclusion of the theme of waiting, replaced by that of presence. A point where all dimensions are present is absolutely indifferent to expectations and all pietism.”

MERZBAU QUANTICO
April 6, 2025 – June 28, 2025
Opening: April 5, 2025
9:30 AM – 12:00 PM
Via Valpetrosa 1, Milan