Deborah Napolitano | Adrian Tranquilli NIGHT’S DREAM
Curated by Antonello Tolve
opening | Saturday 5 July at 7pm
duration | 5 July – 5 August 2025
The Kyro Art Gallery of Pietrasanta is delighted to announce Night’s Dream, the gallery’s presentation of two solo exhibitions from Deborah Napolitano and Adrian Tranquilli to be inaugurated on Saturday 5 July at 7pm.
In the two sequences of works presented by Deborah Napolitano and Adrian Tranquilli, the idea of preserving object recognisability – within the scope of ‘fatal strategies’ where, as we know, the object has taken the place of the subject – comes across clearly, making the iconographic perception immediately clear while, nevertheless, proposing further avenues of interpretation linked to society and open to questions and cultural models with a broad emotional impact.
Moving from the confluence – as well as from the synthesis – of different planes of knowledge and retrieving the figure of the superhero (Batman, Spider-Man, Superman) from the 20th century epic, Adrian Tranquilli puts silence in check with an iconosphere that is a way out of every one-way channel and a subtle breach leading to a visual apocalypse made up of powerful murmurs, creaking consciousness, suspended and reckless scenes, bodies with mystical postures, created through a controlled theatricality where the nakedness of desire is felt and squeezed into the space of thought. In the four works proposed for Night’s Dream – How The End Allways Is (2003), In Excelsis 7 (2024), In Excelsis 8 (2024) and In Excelsis 9 (2025) – Tranquilli follows the path of the ‘Arcisenso’, as outlined by Aldo Masullo: that is, of an Ursinn, which is neither before nor after this or that feeling, but is always the feeling belonging of the original condition.
With the mitis ovium group, a flock of various colours, Deborah Napolitano expands on the theme of the ironic, now no longer solitary, Self-portrait (the black sheep) of 2017 focusing on her capacity to delve extensively into a cultural territory that avoids labels and social conformism, to address issues that are clarified under the spotlights of identity, singularity, particularity, inclusion in a healthy communitas ex gregis where every single head has a coloured fleece – black, red, yellow, blue – that symbolises a different that always differs from the different.
From differing latitudes, Napolitano and Tranquilli take a sidelong yet directed gaze into a marginal territory, made up of exclusivity, hallucinated contortions, powerful and indispensable dissimilarities that become the dominant thinking of a resistance and a practice of daily diffidence. Where the excluded upends the state of diversity, to phenomenalise itself as exception, rarity, singularity, to the point of redefining the face of the other that every other can become.