Sara Bonaventura, Thermal Alchemy | Courtesy Sara Bonaventura

Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, painting on stone supports was a widespread and admired practice: the veining of marble offered naturally charged grounds, already suggestive of landscapes, figures and compositions. Giulio Malinverni (born in Vercelli in 1994), an artist trained at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts, revives this tradition with a contemporary perspective and a rigorous approach born of years of research into the relationship between painting and matter. In the project Natura Morta, Natura Viva, stone is not a mere support but the generative principle of the image: it is the natural veining of marble that suggests forms, subjects and compositions to the artist. Malinverni's painterly intervention is pared back to the essential - a small gesture is enough to transform a mineral surface into a flower, a bird's feathers or an animal's coat - as if painting does not add but reveals what was already there, waiting. The result is a constant tension between still life and living nature, between mineral stillness and biological vitality, in which the hierarchies between the kingdoms of matter grow increasingly ambiguous and ultimately indistinguishable. Each work is a quiet invitation to reconsider our relationship with the world around us, to discover latent life even where inertness seems to reign.

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