Gallística

ArtNoble Gallery presents Gallística, a project by Pietro Fachini in dialogue with a work by Renato Guttuso from the Collezione Ramo, as part of Milano Drawing Week 2025.

The exhibition stems from a residency that Pietro Fachini spent in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, together with his friend and fellow artist Kevin Niggeler, where the two came into contact with the world of fighting cocks. Starting from an anthropological impulse — to study the bond between humans and animals and the cultural forms of ritualized violence — the artist develops a reflection on the idea of the raw as both an existential and perceptual condition. His investigation grapples with a fundamental question: what relationship exists between public opinion and the violent, ruthless products of local cultural practices? During his field research alongside Memo — a trainer and breeder active for thirty-six years in Oaxaca, the second poorest state in Mexico — Fachini observed how a single gesture can instantly erase time and effort, giving concrete form to the idea of the raw. Drawing from life in pueblos and breeding farms, the artist confronts the fine line that separates life from death, and the sudden disappearance of value in a single blow.

This conceptual core takes shape in a series of red chalk studies and intaglio impressions of defeated fighting cocks, created in 2024 and presented in dialogue alongside a 1974 drawing on paper by Renato Guttuso. The dialogue between the two does not hinge on formal continuity but on a shared conviction: that drawing is a tool of direct investigation, capable of translating lived experience into image without rhetorical mediation. Where Guttuso’s observation of reality carried a civic and explicitly political charge, Fachini’s gaze is empathetic and analytical, seeking to understand context before forming judgment. Both, however, share a common horizon: an art that engages reality head-on, conveying its complexity without neutralizing it.

Guttuso’s work serves as the historical anchor of the project. In the immediacy of its mark and the clarity of its line, it reaffirms drawing’s role as a stance toward reality — a lesson in lucidity and responsibility that Fachini’s practice brings into the present.

The collaboration with Collezione Ramo forms part of the fifth edition of Milano Drawing Week 2025 (November 22–30, 2025), a citywide program of exhibitions and dialogues between twentieth- and twenty-first-century works on paper, presented across galleries and institutions throughout Milan.