At Lusvardi Art in Milan, curators Margherita Mezzetti and Arianna Tremolanti gather thirteen artists around a wardrobe rewritten as armory, where every silver ring, every plastic sunglass, every set of hot glittering nails becomes a relic of a self that has not yet decided whether to forgive itself.
A pair of cast aluminum claws sits on a low plinth at the centre of the first room. Samuele Stazi has filed them down to a gothic crest: spaded knuckles, fingernails the length of switchblades, a fringe of black metal quills rising from the cuff like a startled cat. They are not a costume. They are a sculpture pretending to be wearable so that the wearable can be taken seriously as sculpture. The press text speaks of accessories that “mirror oblivious desire, long nights and have nothing to do with the present.” Stazi’s claws answer back in metal: nothing here is innocent of violence.
The show’s logic is set early. Erik Merisalu installs a denture cast in salmon-pink resin, its plate sprouting bronze twigs that branch into a small, undead bouquet. A second cast, a cigarette resting nearby, has its filter wrapped in a fragment of teeth. Mouth becomes hedgerow becomes the place a body keeps the things it would rather forget. Across the room, Nicoletta Busto and Alan Stefanato collaborate on burnt iron reliefs: white marble-like figures fused into rusted picture frames, traversed by chrome surgical hooks and what reads, from a distance, as a riding crop. The picture is not framed; it is restrained.
Sofia Bordin’s contribution is the show’s smallest object and its iconographic key. A medieval miniature of Melusine, the half-serpent saint of false bodies, sits inside a spiked ceramic locket strung from a chain of small knives. It hangs like a votive, but the chain promises injury. This is the move the curators are after: the trinket as theology. As the press text puts it, the objects in your pockets “are nothing but soft armors to you. They are a diary whilst you pick and choose what to keep.” A locket is a diary that is also a knife.
Glamour, here, is treated as a tooled discipline, not a vibe. Giovanni Blandino lengthens the toes of a pair of red crocodile boots into snake-tongue curls that lift off the parquet, half-jester half-courtesan; in another room he hangs a bone-pale baroque hand mirror whose surface is sculpted hair, a dragonfly clamped at its centre as if a Victorian mourning brooch had grown teeth. Silvia Cannarella paints a single black Mary-Jane in oils on a saturated red ground, the heel and bookshelves behind it blurred into a Bonnard-inflected vertigo. Maria Giulia Casco, who shows three doll-faced miniatures inside a brown wood door, treats the painted face as an object you might hang in a hallway and forget to dust. Each work re-enters the same question from a different door: what is the difference between adorning a body and arming it?
The hardest answer comes from the materials themselves. Samuele Stazi returns with a vitrine of glass keys cast in the shape of skeletal hands, threaded onto a rusted iron ring on a purple velvet cushion: the keychain as memento mori, transparent enough to be useless, sharp enough to be jewelry. Sofiia Stepanova piles a green camouflage bucket hat onto a steel table and lets red-and-black hair extensions cascade off its edge like a melting wig. Stefano Melissa carves a pair of orthopedic sneakers from blackened wood and laces them with gingham and climbing rope. Madalina Gaceanu reinforces a corseted vest with patchwork and dried roses. Katya Quel signs a green-glazed ceramic frame with a death-metal logo and lets ceramic daggers hang from its underside like festival pennants. Nina Ćeranić paints a lilac canvas where a real gold chain and pendant lie fused into the brushwork, the sacred medallion sunk inside the painted body. None of these works invent a new object. They expose one.
What unifies the room is the curators’ refusal to soften the contradiction at the heart of personal style. Adornment is presented as a daily theology of becoming someone else, with the cost ledger left open. “They are pleasurable but almost too familiar at times,” reads the text. To wear them is to learn the face, the body, the days, undivided in attention. To pay attention to a ring, a hairpin, a fake nail, is to admit that the self is the soft thing, and the object is the hard one.
Not transcendence, but transience. Not a costume, but a covenant. The closet, after this show, can no longer be mistaken for storage. It is the place where the next self waits, sharpened.
