Due Mondi

Galleria Giovanni Bonelli is pleased to present, at its Milan venue, DUE MONDI, a solo exhibition by artist Gherardo Quadrio Curzio, curated by Lorenzo Madaro. He walks, marvels, and shares his wonder with us; he encounters light, watches it transform, becomes enchanted, and then continues on. Meanwhile, the light sheds its skin—and he does too. The landscape is there, and it transforms: leafless trees traverse a motionless world, yet one in constant metamorphosis, while the protagonist of these images absorbs the luminosity of an expanding cosmos and carries it with him. The two worlds conceived by Gherardo Quadrio Curzio—and presented here for the first time—are the journeys of a nomad living within a continuous ritual. According to the artist, this duality contains the bipolarity of childhood: on one side, “the brightness of the safe nest,” on the other, “the dark path of growth and the loss of innocence.” It is the same world that, at a certain point and without warning, “begins to creak, bringing with it sorrow but also thrills of pleasure.”
And on the other side lies consciousness—but also the desire to take flight, which the birds depicted in Quadrio Curzio’s paintings and watercolors embody in their fullness as symbolic yet real beings. Erratic and heretical, to borrow from Osvaldo Licini, these birds—like the protagonist of the other works—move and observe, cross geographies, pause, look around, map the sky and the earth, suggesting that these two worlds may, in fact, belong to all living species.
The exhibition title, chosen by the artist and borrowed from Demian by Hermann Hesse— “Two worlds merged there, and from two poles came day and night”—speaks to attitudes and intentions, but also to what inevitably happens and reveals itself, regardless of our desires or expectations.
While at first glance Gherardo Quadrio Curzio’s work may appear to echo a visual vocabulary rooted in Surrealism, in truth, his narrative is deeply grounded in life and reality, in the darker backdrops of existence, where time—along with light—becomes the primary condition for exploring the bursts of brightness that illuminate these new images. The second layer of this journey is therefore the essential revelation: from dawn to nightfall, the world painted by Quadrio Curzio belongs to us and reveals itself to us. With the lightness of a little prince, the anonymous anti-hero of his canvases and works on paper lives in a dreamlike yet aware state. Within that secular mysticism of images, appearances, and disappearances—which, in the watercolors, seem to evoke the magical atmosphere of Ontani—the artist offers us the possibility of a soft, even sweet, ecstasy. Gherardo Quadrio Curzio (Milano, 2000) Lives and works in Milan.
Education: Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan – BA in Painting (2021–ongoing).
Exhibitions: Supernatural (2025), a group exhibition at Solo HQ in Pietrasanta; Per Grazia Ricevuta (2024), curated by Alberto Mattia Martini, and Sunset Safari (2024), both group shows at Galleria Giovanni Bonelli in Milan. In 2023, he participated in Animali Fantastici, a group exhibition curated by Gianluca Marziani and Stefano Antonelli at Palazzo Albergati in Bologna; The New Dreamers at Galleria Giovanni Bonelli in Milan; Icons Rebirth, curated by Andrea Lacarpia at Galleria Arrivada in Milan; and Mirabilis, curated by Dany Vescovi and Marco Casentini at Palazzo Meravigli in Milan. In 2022, he took part in Sguardi 2, also curated by Vescovi and Casentini, at Palazzo Parasi in Cannobio. He has also exhibited at Frankfurter Westend Galerie in Frankfurt, at Lorenzelli Arte in Milan.