Francesco Simeti's 'Tutti giù per terra' at Galleria Francesca Minini

Francesco Simeti's exhibition 'Tutti giù per terra' at Galleria Francesca Minini in Milan presents a body of work that merges ornamental allure with critical tension, addressing themes of destruction, power, and environmental crisis. The show features sculptures and a tapestry that blend natural and mechanical elements, drawing from the artist's childhood memories in Alcamo, Sicily, where he assembled agricultural tools and scrap materials. Works like 'Grattalora' and 'Zappaterra' use gutters, wood scraps, and ceramics to create precarious, anthropomorphic forms that evoke industrial machinery and Sicilian puppets. The ceramics, unstable forms resembling flowers, anemones, and marine organisms, are corroded by firing, suggesting both organic and constructed worlds. The titular tapestry, based on a watercolor by Simeti and a text by Luigi Presicce, intertwines bulldozers and excavators with fantastic animals, blurring imagination, memory, and technology. Simeti avoids direct ecological catastrophe representation, favoring perceptual ambiguity between nature and artifice, play and destruction. The title alludes to felled trees and the loss of verticality and control. The exhibition runs at Galleria Francesca Minini in Milan in 2026.