A SECRET FADES IN MY HANDS: AMPARO VIAU'S FIRST SOLO SHOW IN EUROPE

Every artistic project emerges from a particular confluence of circumstances, chance encounters, and material possibilities. In the case of Un secreto se apaga entre mis manos, the solo exhibition that Amparo Viau (Buenos Aires, 1991) presented in Milan during the Italian spring, those conditions were closely tied to the production context. The artist developed the project by hand during a five-week working residency in Gerenzano, a small municipality in the province of Varese, in Lombardy, located just a few kilometers from Milan — improvising a studio in order to bring these large-format pieces to life.

The exhibition also marked a milestone in her career as her first solo presentation in Italy and, specifically, in Europe, at ArtNoble Gallery — a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021, located in the dynamic post-industrial district of Lambrate, in Milan. The opening coincided with the programming of Milano Art Week, one of the city's peak moments of local and international art tourism.

True to an ongoing investigation into drawing as a spatial experience, Viau transformed the exhibition space through an installation built from a continuous drawing of approximately forty meters in length, made with chalk pastels on paper, produced in stages and assembled within the gallery itself. The work envelops the viewer in an immersive journey where drawing ceases to function as an autonomous image and becomes instead a bodily and sensorial experience.

The installation is organized as a sequence of differentiated moments that accompany the viewer's movement through the space. Upon entering, figures appear that seem to remain in a state of formation: barely outlined, fragmentary bodies, close to the sketch, pervaded by an atmosphere of uncertainty. These are images that retain something of drawing's initial, searching character. As the journey progresses, these isolated presences give way to an expansive frieze of intertwining bodies that constitutes the visual core of the show. The figures succeed one another without interruption, forming a chain of gestures, embraces, and torsions that dissolves the boundaries between individual bodies. The composition avoids any hierarchical organization and proposes, instead, a collective dynamic. Color, applied with variable intensity, reinforces this sense of continuous movement and generates zones of visual tension that alternate between the festive, the theatrical, the erotic, and the unsettling.

Within this sequence it is difficult not to think of the Italian mural tradition and, in particular, of the friezes and paintings preserved in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Not because Viau directly cites those images, but because she shares with them a form of narrative construction based on the arrangement of bodies and the articulation of multiple scenes within a single surface. The figures advance, gather, embrace, or disperse along the drawing as if forming part of a contemporary procession coursed through by affect, desire, and tension.

The experience of producing the show in Italy appears to have intensified that dialogue with certain visual traditions. The monumentality of some compositions, the insistence on the nude, and the sequential construction of scenes evoke both ancient mural painting and certain repertoires of the Renaissance. This reading finds an echo in Benedetta Casini's critical text, in which she observes that the persistence of naked bodies evoking sacred iconography reveals Viau's interest in the Renaissance pictorial tradition — an interest soon contradicted by the obscenity of her color. Indeed, if at moments the bodies seem to refer to recognizable historical models, the vibrant, overflowing use of color quickly shatters any nostalgic or academic reading.

In one of the best-known passages of the Purgatorio, Dante Alighieri describes the souls encountered along the way as face to face, each one ready for embrace and kiss. Without literally illustrating that scene, Viau's great frieze seems to recover something of that idea of collective encounter. Her figures form diverse relationships and weave a continuous human fabric that transforms the exhibition space into an experience of circulation, proximity, and recognition.

The final room introduces a shift in scale and rhythm. There, isolated bodies or bodily fragments appear, functioning as close-ups of the multitude previously unfolded. As if the artist had paused her gaze on certain details within the whole, these images shift attention from the choral dynamic toward the singularity of each figure. These solitary presences acquire a particular intensity: they are no longer part of a crowd, but individuals who reclaim their autonomy within the journey.

Materiality plays a fundamental role throughout the project. The use of chalk — a fragile, powdery, easily altered material — reinforces the ephemeral character of the images and preserves the intensity of the manual gesture. On the thickness of the paper, the marks, ruptures, and abrasions introduced by the artist acquire an active presence, emphasizing both the vulnerability of the support and the physical dimension of the working process.

This first European presentation allowed Viau to unfold a challenging body of work within her recent production and to set her practice in dialogue with new visual traditions and cultural contexts. The result is a work that maintains a strong connection with the affective imaginaries present throughout her output, while simultaneously expanding its spatial and narrative reach — consolidating a new chapter in her international trajectory.

The project features an essay by curator Benedetta Casini and is supported by Galería Grasa in Buenos Aires.

Un secreto se apaga entre mis manos by Amparo Viau is on view through June 30, 2026, at ArtNoble Gallery, Via Ponte di Legno 9, Milan, Italy.