Exhibition 'Soft Control' at Tempesta Gallery Explores Power Structures Through Painting

The exhibition 'Soft Control' is currently on view at Tempesta Gallery in Milan, featuring works by artists Paulina Aumayr and Lorenzo Conforti. The show examines themes of power, hierarchy, and invisible social controls through contrasting painting approaches. Aumayr, born in Vienna in 2002, employs a feminist perspective to investigate intersections between seduction and violence, desire and trauma, using a distinctive pale green palette to create intimate yet tense scenes that challenge patriarchal narratives. Her imagery includes recurring motifs like dogs, teeth, and fire, exploring ambivalent spaces between care and threat. Conforti, born in Tolentino in 1996 and working between Milan and Tolentino, creates hybrid, anamorphic objects through a deconstructive process that blends organic anatomies. His works resist accelerated image consumption through indeterminate forms that generate suspended atmospheres. The exhibition title refers to subtle prohibitions and actions embedded in daily life under the guise of necessary norms. Both artists use painting as a critical field that questions rather than provides definitive answers, creating spaces for observation and reflection. The show includes a wall intervention by Conforti at the gallery. In interviews, Aumayr discussed her focus on making patriarchal structures visible in everyday situations, while Conforti described his layered creative process involving graphic bases, improvisation, and spray techniques aimed at emotional engagement. The exhibition attempts to navigate between latent violence in power structures and imagination as resistance, offering deceleration from contemporary life's rapid pace.