Seeing Whales: Five Artists Explore Mimicry and Deception in Painting at Galleria Mazzoli, Modena

The group exhibition 'Seeing Whales' at Galleria Mazzoli in Modena brings together five international artists who investigate visual deception, mimicry, and the tension between reality and representation. Rafael Megall, an Armenian artist, presents a large canvas intricately weaving panthers and exotic animals in a graphic, almost jewelry-like style, forcing viewers to search for hidden forms and evoking lost primal instincts. Hugo López Ayuso creates grotesque, fantastic scenes with a cartoonish style, referencing Dalí and de Chirico while incorporating comic characters to defuse the surreal. Chinese artist Xue Ruozhe employs classical aesthetics to explore the hidden individual, often turning figures away from the viewer to highlight modern communication loss. Cuban artist Ariel Cabrera Montejo blends painting with photography, repainting vintage photos in decontextualized theatrical settings to create new truths. Maria Pääkkönen works with paper and installations, reproducing nature on long rolls and placing natural fragments within the gallery space to blur boundaries between reality and its representation. The exhibition runs until a date not specified in the source.