Giancarlo Consonni - Il conforto dell'ombra

IL CONFORTO DELL’OMBRA
Watercolours, tempera paintings, collages and photographs

Opening: Thursday, 24 September, from 6:00 pm
On view until 24 October 2026


September is like the first month of a new year: after the summer break, we start again with new projects and expectations.
We open with the exhibition Il conforto dell’ombra by Giancarlo Consonni.
This retrospective exhibition offers an overview of Consonni’s extensive visual work. Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at the Politecnico di Milano and a multifaceted intellectual, Consonni reveals through these works a more intimate dimension of his research and his way of looking at the world.
The exhibition features 29 works spanning different periods and techniques Consonni explored throughout his career.
A selection of early tempera paintings from the Incantamenti series (1991–1996) exemplifies a pictorial language based on linear compositions and areas of vivid colour. There are as well watercolours and collages from L’uccello di fuoco (1995–1996), which began with an encounter between a letter-copying album found at a flea market and the element of chance in a visual motif “related to music and dance,” as the artist himself described it.
Moreover, the exhibition includes photographs from the astratto/concreto series—presented in a solo exhibition at the Gallery in 2013—which evoke the impressions of long winter walks by the sea in his beloved Liguria and his attention to the details of his visual world. Also on display are collages from the same year from the Nel Blu series, made from salvaged wrappers, packaging and found paper. Inspired by the electric-blue tissue paper of old kites, Consonni took on the challenge of creating unexpected harmonies starting from the strong tone of the original colour.
Glue, scissors and a craft knife were also the tools behind the collages of the Ascoltando Bach series (2016–2022). Created while listening to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, these works transform the German composer’s Concerts avec plusieurs instruments into concerts avec plusieurs cartes in the architect’s hands.
The exhibition concludes with Arrivo e partenza, a 2025 collage reminiscent of the tone of Consonni’s poetry: a brief, airy construction poised between irony and melancholy, with a lightness that is only apparently minimalist.

BIOGRAPHY

Giancarlo Consonni (Merate, 1943 – Milan, 2026) was a poet, painter, urban planner and photographer.
A multifaceted and original figure in contemporary culture, he combined the rigour of scholarly research with an artist’s sensitivity. Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at the Politecnico di Milano, he helped establish and later directed the Archivio Bottoni.

For Einaudi, he was above all a poet—and one of the most important. Five of his books appeared in the publisher’s “white series” between 1997 and 2025: Vûs, Luì, Filovia, Pinoli and Il conforto dell’ombra. His final book, Se tu fossi fiore, will be presented next year, also by Einaudi.

As an artist, he exhibited his work in a solo exhibition at Fondazione Corrente in Milan in 2008—with a catalogue edited by Antonello Negri—as well as in several group and solo exhibitions at Galleria Consadori in Milan.
Il girotondo delle muse. Architetti e pittori della scuola milanese, held at the Museo Diocesano in Mantua in 2026, was the most recent group exhibition to feature his work.
He also published a series of volumes devoted to his artistic work with La Vita Felice, a Milan-based publishing house.

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