Opacity as a healing space

Opacity as a Healing Space, a double solo exhibition by Szilvia Bolla and Lorenzo Conforti, investigates hybrid forms of resilience in a visually oversaturated and psychologically charged world. The artists’ languages intertwine into slow-paced contemplation, resisting the ever-pressing demand for clear meaning whilst cherishing the ambiguous and the unresolved instead.

Deeply rooted in the psychological dimension of image-making, Lorenzo Conforti’s painting practice stems from a process of blending images of different organic anatomies. The hybrid, almost entirely abstract results are vagueness heralds, designed as mental resistance to the contemporary urge to define, explain, or signify, which is central to the artist’s practice. These layered visions strive to escape the clarifying speed that usually dominates visual culture, offering charged yet elusive spaces home to psychological transition instead. Each painting becomes an inner landscape where nothing is fixed; everything fluctuates and remains unsettled, mirroring the human condition marked by fragmentation and uncertainty. Mental fog, sensory overload, and snow syndrome – a phenomenon regularly experienced by Conforti himself – overlap in a path towards the invisible, a central matter for the artist. Paintings of assorted dimensions, dispersed around the gallery, reveal this fascination with the void and what surrounds form rather than form itself. A series of moulds alternate different degrees of stylization and finally fade into an evanescent site-specific intervention, unfurling placidly on the walls of the space.