4 September 2025   –   Time to read: 5 min

Milan, 18 September – Verona, 20 September – Turin, 25 September 2025, end 1 november 2025

MARCOROSSI artecontemporanea presents Infinite Transparencies, the new solo exhibition by Ivan De Menis (Treviso, 1973), opening in September in the galleries of Milan, Verona, and Turin. After the summer preview in Pietrasanta, the exhibition project now unfolds across three venues, offering a broad and engaging vision of the artist’s most recent research.

De Menis’ painting, despite its abstract nature, maintains a deep connection with the Venetian luminist tradition. The shifting light, the reflections of water, and the chromatic stratifications typical of vedutisti masters resurface in works that vibrate with visual intensity. Through superimpositions of enamels, oils, and epoxy resins, the artist builds surfaces that amplify depth and brightness, giving color a liquid and almost atmospheric quality.

The title *Infinite Transparencies* alludes to this ongoing dialogue between light and matter, but also to the relationship with **time**, a key element in De Menis’ work: the time of making, composed of repeated gestures and patient stratifications, and the time of viewing, which requires the spectator’s slow and attentive observation to grasp nuances and changes.

The Compressions

A significant part of the exhibition is dedicated to the compressions, works made on canvas and polystyrene subjected to a long process of mechanical compression through heavy iron plates. In these pieces, the tearing of the canvas from the polystyrene generates unexpected outcomes, almost evoking the technique of fresco detachment. The simultaneous use of oil and water-based colors introduces further reactions and contrasts, revealed in the compressed surface: pigment and support merge, undergo irreversible metamorphoses, and return unforeseen images, as if color had been “sculpted” by time and pressure.

The Tesserae

Alongside these works, the so-called tesserae assume an equally central role. Not mere paintings, but true resin volumes of regular form, preserving within them traces and pictorial stratifications. Each tessera appears as a kind of translucent box, compact and rigorous in its frontality, yet surprising in its lateral details, where chromatic passages, drips, and imperfections emerge, revealing the vitality of the process.

Arranged in sequences or isolated like fragments, the tesserae create the impression of a potentially infinite mosaic, a whole made up of autonomous microcosms while at the same time in dialogue with one another.

The Poetics

“I never seek a definitive image – states the artist in the interview conducted on the occasion of the exhibition – but a continuous dialogue between color, time, and matter. Each work is the result of a transformation process that never truly ends, because it continues in the gaze of the observer.”

With Infinite Transparencies, Ivan De Menis invites us to look beyond the surface, to perceive painting as a sensory and cognitive experience. It is a work built in and upon time: the artist’s time, which sediments and transforms matter, and the viewer’s time, which in waiting and contemplation discovers new possibilities of vision.

The Artist

Ivan De Menis (Treviso, 1973) trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. His pictorial research, developed over the past twenty years, explores the relationship between light, matter, and time through a language that combines rigor and chromatic sensitivity. His works have been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad and are part of public and private collections.