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IVAN BARLAFANTE
Giulianova, 1967
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Opening 15 November 2025 at 12:00 noon
15 November 2025 - 15 January 2026
Tuesday - Saturday 1:00 pm - 6:00 pm
GMR, Giudecca 800 Q, Venice
The Michela Rizzo Gallery is pleased to present Boulder, the group exhibition that will conclude the exhibition series at the former brewery site. The exhibition, which will open on Saturday 15 November 2025 at 12:00, will feature a dialogue between the work of Hamish Fulton and that of Matthew Attard, Ivan Barlafante, Michael Höpfner, Francesco Jodice, Ryts Monet, Maurizio Pellegrin, Cesare Pietroiusti, David Rickard, Antonio Rovaldi, Mariateresa Sartori, Claudio Tesser and Silvano Tessarollo.
Boulders is inspired by the work Boulder by Hamish Fulton, a British artist who has made walking an artistic language and an act of awareness. Based on direct experience of the landscape and a radical conception of the relationship between art and nature, Fulton's work becomes the starting point for a choral and intergenerational dialogue around the symbol of the boulder, an emblem of strength, permanence and memory of the landscape.
Within this horizon, the artists in the exhibition are arranged according to their varying degrees of proximity to Fulton's thinking. Michael Höpfner and Antonio Rovaldi share his experiential and meditative approach more directly: both investigate walking as a means of knowledge and immersion in the landscape, restoring its physical and inner dimensions through drawings, photographs and installations.
More lateral but deeply akin in poetic tension are Mariateresa Sartori, Matthew Attard and Ivan Barlafante, who translate their relationship with nature into languages of perception and thought. Sartori presents a large installation created using the frottage technique, dedicated to the materials of stones and sand, accompanied by a book that intertwines artistic vision and scientific observation. Attard, through drawing and the use of a pen plotter, transforms three-dimensional scans of boulders into graphic tracings that blend digital precision and manual intervention, exploring the limits of perception and image.
Around these nuclei are gathered artists who, while starting from different languages and perspectives, broaden the reflection on the link between man, nature and space. David Rickard explores the material and perceptual relationships between architecture and the environment; Ryts Monet, Maurizio Pellegrin, Cesare Pietroiusti and Francesco Jodice offer conceptual and narrative visions that open up the theme of landscape to new cultural and social geographies. In particular, Jodice presents a large-scale work from the WEST project, a journey through cities born during the gold rush and now abandoned, in which the landscape becomes an archive of utopias and failures.
Silvano Tessarollo and Claudio Tesser present works in which nature reveals itself in its fragile concreteness, between memory, time and transformation. The exhibition will centre on two wall paintings by Hamish Fulton, Glacial Boulder and Revisiting The Boulders, which will occupy a significant part of the space, giving shape and breath to the entire project.
With Boulder, the Michela Rizzo Gallery concludes an important season of its journey on the Giudecca, entrusting the image of the boulder – solid and immobile but at the same time shaped by time – with the task of preserving the memory of a shared place and time. A landing place that is also a threshold: the last step before a new direction.
Ivan Barlafante (Giulianova, 1967) lives and works in Rome. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in L'Aquila, where his teacher was Fabio Mauri; over time, their relationship evolved until, by the mid-1990s, Ivan began taking part in his teacher's performances. He investigates the relationship between the natural and spiritual dimensions through an artistic language that, starting from conceptual art, blends elements of Land Art, Fluxus, and Arte Povera. He uses industrial and natural materials, sound, and light to create installations where the viewer, like an alchemist, is guided toward perceptual and cognitive transformations. In many works, boulders or stones are split open and lined on the inside with reflective surfaces, generating a perception of "the beyond" that reveals an immanent divine. According to the artist, it is aesthetic beauty itself that allows "harsh and terrible reality" to manifest itself to human eyes, triggering a journey toward the knowledge of the divine that dwells within reality.
In 1998, he founded the ICE BADILE studio group in Rome together with E. Leofreddi, C. Longo, C. Di Carlo, and A. Orsini. His practice is a gesture of breaking and reconstructing matter, aimed at stimulating awareness and a relationship with the world. Among the main exhibitions, we should mention Andromeda e Cassiopea, a mirrored steel installation that covered an entire square in Prague during "Prague European Capital of Culture". In 2001, he participated in the 8th Cairo Art Biennale and in the group exhibition Cosa arcana e stupenda curated by Andrea Bellini; in 2004, he held the solo exhibition In me at the Oredaria gallery in Rome; in 2006, he created I Love You at the Tempietto del Carmelo, Rome. In 2009, the artwork Ti Amo was selected for Claudio Giovannesi's film La casa sulle nuvole, awarded as best first feature at the Rome Film Festival in 2012. In 2014, he participated in the Bienal del Fin del Mundo in Mar del Plata; in 2015, he exhibited in Flags at the Serra dei Giardini in Venice, a collateral event of the Biennale. In 2016, he created the permanent artwork Perché io sono te for the Fondazione La Verde La Malfa in the Art Park of Catania, and in the same year, the Galleria Michela Rizzo in Venice hosted the solo exhibition L’orizzonte rovesciato, curated by Laura Cherubini. In 2017, he exhibited 45° 27′ 22″ N 12° 23′ 10″ E on the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo in Venice and participated in the group exhibition LimitiConfini at the Grande Museo del Duomo in Milan; in the same year, he was a jury member for the Cramum prize. The same year, he received the Level 0 prize at ArtVerona. In 2018, he created I am what I do with my hands, ArtVerona, Villa Donisi, Cerea (October 10-18), La bellezza dell’inutile at the Civic Museums of Bassano del Grappa, curated by Chiara Casarin; he participated in Avevo 20 anni at Villa Bagatti Valsecchi (MI) and presented the solo exhibition Tremendo: il bello è solo l’inizio at the Gaggenau DesignElementi Hub space in Milan, with ten stone and steel sculptures exploring the encounter between beauty and the transcendent. In 2019, he exhibited in essere || non essere.
In 2022, he participated in Vittime civili di guerre incivili (February 1–18) and from July to September 2022 he took part in the group exhibition Bello Mondo at Galleria Michela Rizzo. Among the most recent exhibitions: in 2025, he participated in Friends. Artisti, Curatori & Galleristi in the spaces of Spazio Thetis at the Arsenale Novissimo in Venice. Also in 2025, he was featured with Recupero, a project promoted by ICE BADILE as part of the Triennale Design Museum in Milan (April–October 2025). From November 2025 to January 2026, he participated in the group exhibition Boulders at Galleria Michela Rizzo. His work is documented in the catalogues of Spazio Thetis, Galleria Michela Rizzo, CRAMUM, and ICE BADILE. His art is held in public and private collections, not forgetting collective contributions such as Recupero for the Triennale Design Museum in Rome in 2013.
In May 2026, he curated the exhibition Fabio Mauri. L’Esperimento del Tempo at Galleria Michela Rizzo, Venice.
