TRACES OF THE INTANGIBILE

TRACES 
2022

ceramica smaltata tracce piastrella segmentata con tracce di pizzo ingobbiato

 

 

Fragile like the skin of time, these ceramic fragments emerge as relics of a gesture, of a form that seeks not perfection, but survival. They are, in fact, remnants. The traces left by a passage, a contact, an abandonment.

The surface—cracked or eroded—speaks of what has been lost and what remains. The cracks become maps, the fabric imprints a memory of the body and hands. The white, a line interrupted by faint traces of color, evokes what time has erased but which persists as a visual echo, a silent testimony.

These works don’t tell stories, they whisper. They don’t shout meanings, but open spaces for listening. They present themselves as partial finds, unclassifiable artifacts that resist the erosion of oblivion. The title—Remnants—is both a declaration and a question: what remains today of what we once were? What remains of a gesture, a habit, a presence?

In their apparent immobility, these forms seem to continue to transform. They bear the weight of what is no longer there, but they also carry the subtle strength of a beauty that does not demand centrality. A beauty found in the worn edges, in the absences, in the voids.

They are not finished works: they are what survives the work itself.

 

 

CHILDHOOD REMAINS TRACES OF THE INTANGIBLE
2007

 

cement stones installation childhood fossil games

 

Childhood objects—those that once inhabited our rooms and filled our games—resurface in these works as metonyms of memory, tangible signs of what we were and, in part, still are. In the artist’s hands, these fragments become catalysts of memory, symbolic condensations of primordial fears, visionary fantasies, and dreams too fragile to withstand the passage of time.

Through a process of material stratification, the artist constructs a visual landscape in which rough surfaces—concrete, plaster, pigments—open up to reveal submerged traces. Lost objects, hybrid figures, and fantastical creatures emerge like archaeological finds from an inner time. It is a symbolic excavation, in which every artistic gesture corresponds to a gesture of memory, an attempt to bring back childhood not as a clear image, but as a poetic presence, an echo.

Memory, in these works, manifests itself not as an orderly archive, but as a fog. The forms are uncertain, their texture restless, devoid of defined contours: the gaze is invited into an act of reconstruction, an exercise in attention and tenderness. Ambiguity becomes the expressive key, as if the past could never truly return, but only be evoked through clues, imprints, and emotional resonances.

The rough and angular materials, chosen precisely for their ability to simultaneously reveal and conceal, create a contrast between the hardness of the material and the delicacy of the content. It is in this tension that the work’s deeper meaning is revealed: childhood is represented not as an idealized innocence, but as a living ruin, as that which survives beneath layers of time, oblivion, and transformation.

Each work is, ultimately, a small monument to the intangible. A fragile yet tenacious act of resistance to oblivion. An attempt to mend the distance between what we were and what we have become.

 

 

REMAINS
2022

“Christiane”
Plaster and fabric – Variable dimensions – Two floor elements, freely positionable even at a distance

How many times did the touch hesitate on the surface of that fabric, tracing every fold like uncertain maps of memory. Now it lies abandoned. Yet in its abandonment, something emerges.

Like a relic unearthed from silent layers, the fabric solidified in plaster becomes a discovery. No longer an object of use, but a trace. No longer a cover, but an imprint. Matter that holds the gesture and returns it in mute form.

This work is part of the Remains of Childhood series, where fabric becomes a metonym for what once was: unconscious protection, refuge, a wordless sense of belonging. Two separate elements, like memories, like bodies. Yet still in relation.

Sculpture as excavation — not to reveal what is visible, but to bring to light what left a mark.

REFUGE/RIFUGIO

REFUGE

 

golden refuge 2

 

 

This series stems from a reflection on the meaning of “refuge.” Not all places called “refuge” truly are. In some, one is more exposed than protected. Language retains the name, but the gesture that once grounded it has been lost. This gap between word and thing becomes the starting point.

“Refuge” derives from the Latin refugium, from re- (return) and fugere (to flee). It does not simply indicate a place one goes to, but a movement that comes to a halt: the end of fleeing, the retraction of being.

In Ancient Greek, the corresponding word is kataphygé, from kata- (downward, deeply) and phygé (flight): a descent into flight, a motion that lets itself fall downward, toward something that protects.

In German, two words appear side by side: Zuflucht, a flight toward something, and Refugium, a more philosophical and intimate word — a place of retreat and contemplation. In Italian, we have retained only rifugio, while the Latin refugiumsurvives as a literary or spiritual trace.

The refuges I build in this series are small, ephemeral structures, made from humble, found, and salvaged materials. They are models, but not in the architectural sense. They are attempts at a gesture, traces of an act: that of withdrawing, of seeking protection, of looking for a place where the flight might finally come to rest.

They are not houses. They are not temples. They are attempts.

Each refuge is also a question: is there still, today, a space where it is truly possible to take refuge?

BEHIND THE DOOR

BEHIND THE DOOR

Mixed media on shaped panel
Variable dimensions

 

 

This work arises from a question that seems simple, but isn’t: what happens to the space we leave behind when we close the door to our home?

Behind the door, the moment it shuts, what was once a lived-in space begins to transform. It becomes a silent absence. Objects remain, but are no longer seen. Rooms persist, but as if they withdraw into themselves, distant from the gaze.

The work doesn’t aim to represent a domestic interior, but to evoke emptied space—the moment in which presence gives way to memory. It is the abandoned place that begins to speak, not through things, but through the atmosphere that gathers within it.
This is not nostalgia, but a reflection on suspended time, on emptiness as an active space, which holds traces and resonance.

Panofsky wrote that every representation of space is also a mental construction. In this sense, the shaped panels are not merely surfaces to paint on, but attempts to give form to an inner space—perceived, embodied, sedimented in memory.

Each painting is a threshold, a fragment that seeks to hold onto what usually escapes: the instant a place stops being inhabited, yet doesn’t cease to exist.
There, in the distance between the gaze and what has been left behind, another presence takes shape. Silent. Invisible. Persistent.

 

 

ARCHIVE/ARCHIVIO

ARCHIVE

2008 installation Drawings on paper Metal Variable size structure archive variable dimensions Hicetnunc 2005 San Vito al Tagliamento Elena Armellini
2008 installation
Drawings on paper
Metal
Variable size structure
archive variable dimensions Hicetnunc 2005 San Vito al Tagliamento Elena Armellini

In a time when matter seems to dissolve into the virtual, Archive seeks to restore weight, texture, and silence to things.
Transparent crystals and opaque stones—real or evoked—become signs of a geological and inner knowledge, where each fragment holds time like a fossil lens.

The installation unfolds through two complementary gestures.

In the first, drawings are accumulated like bundles, as if samples gathered during forgotten journeys. They are layered on the wall, mapping an unstable matter, a visual archive of shining or matte forms, smoothed or fractured. An intuitive atlas, where the north is traced by the way light refracts.

In the second gesture, drawings are perforated and stacked on sharp metal spikes, like archived files or exhausted documents. Here, the archive becomes anatomical: cut, pierced, piled up. It is an inquiry into the body of the sign, the end of its function, and its survival as relic or debris.

Archive is both a material and mental space, where each form retains a temperature, a vibration, an echo.
There is no system: only gathering.
There is no catalog: only time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CARTOGRAPHIES OF THE POSSIBLE/ CARTOGRAFIE DEL POSSIBILE

URBAN
Urban 2 Jarach Gallery Venezia Elena Armellini

The Urban series emerges from a visual and conceptual need that runs throughout Elena Armellini’s practice: a sharp confrontation with the unexpected, with space, and with matter. In these works, the artist addresses urbanization as a metaphor for contemporary instability, constructing structures that seem to rest on uncertain foundations, suspended between balance and collapse. These are installations that do not mimic the city, but evoke its unstable, fragmented soul.

The works unfold in platforms that communicate across a dilated, almost rarefied space, like a mental architecture taking shape through matter. Their language is made of precarious balances and broken lines, creating silent tensions—as if each element could collapse at any moment. The resulting atmosphere is that of a post-industrial landscape, an abandoned amusement park where the euphoria of construction has dissolved into the anticipation of disaster.

Matter—concrete, iron rods, wood—becomes the bearer of this tension. Nothing is hidden or polished: every surface bears the traces of process, of constructive urgency, of time pressing upon the material. These raw and brutal elements, handled through essential gestures, become witnesses to compressed collective memory, to a mental city where the urban element is dismantled, stripped to the bone, turned into symbol.

Urban is, then, a cartography of uncertainty. A representation of urban space not as a habitable scene, but as a field where the structures of our time—economic, emotional, social—tremble, fracture, and reshape themselves. The works raise a troubling and urgent question: what truly holds the form of our present together?


CARTOGRAPHY OF THE POSSIBLE

Kublai Khan doesn’t necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities he visited during his expeditions, but the Tartar emperor continues to listen to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows to any of his messengers or explorers. In the lives of emperors, there’s a moment that follows the pride in the infinite expanse of the territories we’ve conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing that we’ll soon abandon all thought of knowing and understanding them. There’s a sense of emptiness that pervades us in the evening, with the smell of elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes cooling in the bronze…