27 November 2025 – 24 January 2026
Opening: Thursday, November 27th, 2025 from 18.00
Riccardo Nannini
Walk the Line
Magic Bus Project Room
curated by Ivan Quaroni
Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea is pleased to present Walk the Line, a solo exhibition by Riccardo Nannini curated by Ivan Quaroni, opening on Thursday 27 November 2025 in the spaces of Magic Bus, the project room the gallery sets aside for experimentation and emerging languages.
The show features a selection of recent paintings that narrate the ironic and subtle vision of the Tuscan artist now residing in Barcelona. Nannini observes everyday life with an attentive, detached gaze, transforming apparently ordinary scenes – suburban houses, service stations, courtyards – into suspended microcosms inhabited by immobile figures and animals, caught in an only apparent moment of stillness.
The title Walk the Line, borrowed from Johnny Cash, refers to the fragile balance between harmony and disenchantment, rationality and the unexpected, which runs through all the painting of Nannini. In his creations reality seems static, as if frozen in the moment in which normality breaks up and offers a glimpse of something disturbing.
Among the works in the show: Breakfast with Wolves (2025), where a couple has breakfast in the garden of their home, while two wolves circulate on the sidewalk beyond the wall; Tiger Queen (2024), which shows a woman with a tiger on a leash, amidst the remains of the society of consumption; The Old Gas Station (2025) and The Carnival Party (2025), inhabited by groups stopped in a theatrical suspension; and Welcome (2025), a domestic scene in which the calm is menaced with an unexpected disquiet.
Nannini constructs his narratives with a limpid palette of pinks, blues and greens, conveying a clear, luminous atmosphere. But behind the orderly surface of his paintings lurks a subtle disturbance, an entropic vibration that crosses the represented world. In Walk the Line the artist explores precisely this threshold: the point in which visual stability allows the hidden forces of reality to emerge.
Riccardo Nannini was born in 1980 in Grosseto. He currently lives and works in Barcelona and southern Tuscany.
With a degree in Industrial Design from the Milan Polytechnic, after working with the fashion designer Andrea Incontri he moved to Barcelona in 2010, radically changing his career and lifestyle. He began to experiment with drawing and painting, and the reflections involved in these labors led to his first steps in the field of art. The absurdity of human nature and the pressure of social interactions in the definition of identity remain central themes of his works. Nannini has immersed himself in the underground scene of the city, collaborating with various magazines, galleries and emerging brands. In 2014, under the pseudonym Cane, he held his first solo show, “Between Egypt and Indonesia,” a surreal story based on the life of Diogenes. In the years to follow his style matured and the narration in his works developed around reflections on the constructs of the image and the convention, based on elements of the artistic tradition, of pop imagery or mass culture. After more than ten years of study and practice, his work has been shown in many solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Asia.
