June 12 – July 25, 2025
Opening: Thursday, June 12 from 18
Storie Dipinte
Agnese Guido
Silvia Paci
curated by Ivan Quaroni
Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea is pleased to present Storie Dipinte, a double show featuring Agnese Guido and Silvia Paci, curated by Ivan Quaroni. The show brings together two of the most original voices of the new Italian figurative movement and explores the narrative dimension of painting, taking it back to its origins – when the image was not yet an autonomous nor self-referential act, but a language for storytelling.
Balancing between iconographic tradition and comtemporary imagination, Guido and Paci reclaim the ancient function of painting as a means to construct worlds, visions, fables or visual enigmas. Their artworks lie along an axis that connects mythical storytelling and personal experience, allegory and auto-biography, symbol and dream.
Agnese Guido transforms the everyday into a magical farce. Her cities, objects and characters are suspended between espressionist irony and surrealist invention, in a style of painting that plays with proportions, subverts hierarchies and transfigures the ordinary into theatrical scenes. Her work is a fantastical reflection on reality, in which every detail becomes a narrative clue – an effect of a pictorial relativism that makes each scene resemble a dreamlike mistery.
Silvia Paci’s work, on the other hand, has its roots in the world of fables, folklore and mythologies. Her paintings are inhabited by masks, fetishes, dolls, clawed shoes and characters that seem to have stepped out from Collodi’s stories or childhood dreams. Her artworks depict choral scenes, masked self-portraits, or fairytale allegories in which deception, disguise and metamorphosis become both narrative and symbolic devices. The artist’s self-portrait is a recurring element in her paintings, often crowded with figures like 17th-century canvases, where truth and fiction merge seamlessly.
The title Storie Dipinte is an explicit reference to the 1958 first solo exhibition of Dino Buzzati, a painter and writer who, more than most, embodied the idea of art as a means of storytelling through images. In the same spirit, the works of Guido and Paci renew the role of painting as a narrative language, restoring to it the evocative, enigmatic and visionary power that modernity has often tried to forget.
Agnese Guido was born in Lecce in 1982. She currently lives and works in Milan. With a degree in Painting from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts of Milan, she has taken part in various exhibitions in Italy and abroad. Her work is based on intuitive research on the symbolism of images, through painting and drawing, the languages with which she explores the poetic, paradoxical and disturbing aspects of reality.
Her recent works lean towards a more mysterious, evocative and at the same time carnal dimension, in which the unpredictability of the subjects becomes a key factor.
Silvia Paci was born in Prato in 1990, and currently lives and works in Milan. After having studied Painting at the Fine Arts Academy of Florence, she moved to Berlin in 2016, where she continued her training with the painter Eoin Llewellyn at the Berlin Art Class. That same year she spent time in Beijing for an art residency sponsored by the gallery The Showroom and by the Australian collector and ambassador in Beijing Geoff Raby, in the Chaochangdi district. In 2020 she moved to Milan for an art residency at VIAFARINI. Her painting represents reality without being realistic, creating illusion not through imitation but with the breaking down of subjects, the cutting of images and the choice of colors. Her work has been featured in many solo and group shows in Italy and abroad, held in galleries and institutional spaces.
