Painting and live music

Sensing the Chaos

Exhibition · Milan, 2023

Between chaos and harmony, between the inside and the outside.

Sensing the Chaos was an evening of painting and live music at Godot, in Milan, on 3 February 2023. It brought together my painting Sensing Jupiter and the music of Vijaya Trentin, pianist, composer and singer. It began as a collaboration: while I was painting the canvas, the songs of her new album became its soundtrack, and the two fitted together perfectly.

The name comes from Jupiter. Seen from outside it is calm and majestic, the giant of the solar system that shields us from the dangers of the cosmos. Inside, it holds the strongest storms in the solar system, a chaos beyond our understanding and a striking metaphor for what many of us feel within. The evening was born from that contrast.

The vernissage was curated by Spazio Arte. I presented the painting and the idea behind it, and Vijaya played live, between free improvisation and a preview of Chrysalis, her debut album, released on 24 February: music that gently breaks the stillness of consciousness and wakes the dreams. While she played, I painted the last strokes of the canvas in front of everyone.

Sensing Jupiter: a girl floats upside down in deep space, beside Jupiter, with a great eye between them

“There is a primordial fabric that connects all existence. Some see it in a metaphysical way, some in nature, some in religion. Even physics, with its new discoveries, shows us that we are nothing but fluctuations of the same fields that pervade existence.”

Painting at the easel under a tall arched window, the audience in silhouette

Presenting the evening with Vijaya, the painting on the easel behind

Vijaya at the keys, the audience in front

As Vijaya says, from the union of the arts the infinite can be born: when different creativities meet, they resonate and strengthen one another. So at the end of the evening I brought a canvas begun three years before, whose elements had come together by chance over time. In it, Cabanel's Fallen Angel opens my artistic space to other people's impressions, and I asked everyone there, artists or not, to leave a symbol of what the evening had given them: a drop, to help fill the sea of emotions that we artists feed on.

Guests painting their symbols on the shared canvas

Guests at the vernissage, three of the paintings on the wall behind them

The poster: Sensing the Chaos, a butterfly over Jupiter inside a ring of piano keys

When: Friday 3 February 2023, from 20:00 till late
Where: Godot, Piazza XXIV Maggio, Milan
Vernissage: Curated by Spazio Arte
Music: Vijaya Trentin, unreleased songs from Chrysalis
Painting: Sensing Jupiter, finished live

Sensing Jupiter The paintings of the Surreal Chapter