Luigi Carboni's scribbles become human figures at Scaramouche Gallery Milan

Scaramouche Gallery, now relocated near Fondazione Prada in Milan after its New York past, presents a solo exhibition of Italian artist Luigi Carboni (born 1957 in Pesaro). The show explores Carboni's practice where graphic marks—from segmented hatched lines to endless curving scribbles—are not mere outlines but animate figures with physical and emotional vigor. After focusing on grids in the late 1980s and painting in the 1990s, Carboni turned in 2019 to redefining the sketch as a primary element. The exhibition features large canvases with bright colors (pink, green, light blue) obscured by heavy black strokes that appear casual but are meticulously crafted, revealing human-like forms between caricature and graffiti. Hands are particularly prominent, autonomous and charged with almost violent passion. Beyond paintings, the show includes marble slabs where Carboni's marks follow, modulate, and diverge from the stone's veins, producing incredibly human figurative results—reminiscent of Michelangelo seeing the final sculpture in the raw block, but here yielding expressive, non-classical forms akin to Basquiat and 20th-century American trends. The exhibition concludes with a group of glazed ceramic sculptural portraits: bright, dynamic, essential, and almost archaic, recalling Greek theater masks with exaggerated expressions that tell funny or tragic stories, leaving an intriguing ambiguity.