Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea is pleased to present Blurred Frequencies, the new solo exhibition by Dario Maglionico (Naples, 1986), one of the most compelling artist in the new wave of Italian figurative painting. The show is hosted in the Magic Bus, spaces, the gallery’s project room dedicated to experimentation and emerging languages.
The exhibition, curated by Ivan Quaroni, presents a previously unseen series of paintings that delve into the Studi del buio, cycle – one of the lesser-known yet most evocative strands of the artist’s research. In these works, Maglionico explores an atmospheric and perceptual form of painting, where narrative dissolves into a rarefied and hypersaturated vision, deeply influenced by his own experiences in Milan’s clubs and squatted social centers.
Blurred Frequencies is an immersion into nocturnal environments pulsing with electic energy, where crowded figures barely emerge from the shadows, as if captured in a long photographic exposure. The intense chromatic palette – crimson red, cobalt blue – conveys the incandescence of the techno scene, evoking not only music, but the psychophysical state of collective trance.
Titles lik Otolab, Ivreatronic and Detune evoke the landscape of audiovisual performance, that Maglionico reshapes into a pictorial grammar made of vibrations, distortions and visual echoes. His canvases thus become photosensitive surfaces where bodies are not isolated entities, but fluid presences, merged into a non-hierarchical collectivity, wrapped in uncertain but flickering light.
Compared to the earlier Studi del buio these works mark a shift: the introduction of new chromatic codes, but above all, a previously unseen iconographic openness that brings together memory, lived experiences, and visions according to a layered temporality. Philosopher Federico Ferrari, quoted by the artist, describes it as “a breach in time”, in which past and future coexist in a single painted instant.
In Blurred Frequencies, proposes an “out of focus” painting – fuzzy, as he defines it – that induces an expanded perception, inviting the viewer to desynchronize from standard time and rediscover a new rythm of vision. His images, resembling suspended hallucinations, are snapshots of the present that preserve memory of reality while simoultaneously opening up new possibilities of seeing
Dario Maglionico was born in Naples in 1986. He currently lives and works in Milan. With a degree in Biomedical Engineering from the Milan Polytechnic, he now focuses exclusively on painting. He was recently a finalist of the Fondazione VAF Prize. Maglionico’s work has been shown in several renowed international art fairs amongst which Pulse Miami Beach, Volta Basel and Urvanity Madrid. In 2020 he inaugurates the solo show Doppelgänger, at Vin Gallery in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. In 2018 he inaugurates the solo show Everyday is like Sunday , curated by Ivan Quaroni, at Galleria Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea in Milan and the group exhibition If The Walls Could Talk at Alice Black Gallery in London. In 2016 he collaborates with the writer Domenico Starnone, and he realized the illustrations included in the book Scherzetto published by Einaudi. In 2023 Fondazione VAF-Stiftung published the monograph Dario Maglionico. Dove abita il tempo sospeso , edited by Nicoletta Colombo. The monograph has been presented during Maglionico’s last solo show FLOATING SPACE at Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea.
