Solo Exhibition By Nico Bonomolo
Curated by Laura Francesca di Trapani

dal 3 al 9 agosto 2026 · 19:00-24:00
Villa Cattolica, Corpo C
Vernissage, 4 agosto 2026 · 19:00

Every image is a narrative principle.
Not because it necessarily contains a story, but because it carries with it the possibility of generating one. An image is always a threshold: it opens a space between what appears and what remains hidden, between presence and its trace, between the time of vision and that of memory, becoming the place where the psyche projects, recognizes, and transforms its own representations. Each contains a story: a half-open door, an empty room, a window, an unmade bed. Light passes through an interior and hints at a presence now absent or still invisible; the still surface of water, the silence of a landscape, the gaze of a face, the hieratic fixity of an animal, become so many thresholds to what the frame does not show.

In Nico Bonomolo’s pictorial places, it is not action that generates the narrative, but its suspension. The story inhabits what escapes the gaze, what remains beyond the margin of the pictorial space. It is in this in-between time, in this space of waiting and tension between presence and absence, that Storytelling takes shape. These scenes do not recount concluded events: they preserve possibilities. They are suspended fragments, moments stolen from the flow of time, in which something seems to have just happened or is about to happen. Not a succession of events, but an imaginative space; a magnetic field in which the visible holds the invisible.

Storytelling is a word that belongs profoundly to our present. It is the language of communication, of the construction of narratives, of the continuous production of images that cross our gaze daily. But in his work, the term sheds its more ephemeral dimension and returns to its origins: storytelling as a primary human gesture, as a tool through which to shape the world, preserve memory, and construct symbolism. In an age dominated by the hypertrophy of the visible, his painting restores them to a different time. A slow, contemplative time, capable of removing them from the speed of consumption and returning them to the depth of experience. His painting does not feed the incessant flow of the visible: it demands a pause. In his research, painting, cinema, and writing coexist as parts of a single poetic system; the author brings into painting the narrative structure of cinema and the temporal dimension of writing.

It is not a question of referencing cinema through painting, but of adopting the director’s gaze as a compositional principle. Each work seems to be a frame removed from a larger sequence; it doesn’t tell what happens, but preserves what could happen. The narrative focuses on the interval, the margin, the off-screen. It is precisely what isn’t shown that makes the image necessary. In cinematic language, the off-screen is the invisible space that continues to operate beyond the frame. In Bonomolo’s painting, it takes on an existential dimension, becoming a space of the psyche: what is missing becomes a presence, what we don’t see continues to work in our imagination. His landscape doesn’t ask to be interpreted, but traversed.

All the works construct a visual atlas, a constellation whose meaning arises from relationship. As in memory maps, there is no single narrative line: there are returns, correspondences, resonances. Each refers to the others, constructing an invisible plot. A female portrait, a soft-boiled egg, a cow, trees, a swimming pool, the landscape of Capo Zafferano, a skull. Seemingly distant fragments, these subjects actually belong to the same symbolic territory.

The face holds the enigma of presence. The egg evokes the beginning, fragility, and possibility. The animal takes on an archaic, almost archetypal dimension. Nature becomes memory and duration. The pool suspends time in its still surface. The skull introduces limits, awareness of the end, the call of the memento mori. When placed side by side, these works construct a geography of memory. The images seem to recall each other from a distance, as if belonging to the same hidden constellation. Each element retains its own identity, but at the same time participates in a broader system of references, associations, and survivals. This is the profound nature of his storytelling: not the narration of a pre-written story, but the construction of a visual archive through which the narrative continues to transform. Color also contributes to constructing meaning.

From the red of the typewriter, the narrative incipit, the painting progresses toward progressive subtraction. The palette becomes desaturated, color gives way to light, and matter approaches photography. This reduction does not diminish the work’s power, but rather amplifies its evocative power. In this balance between presence and absence, between memory and vision, subtraction is not a renunciation, but a form of concentration. Reduction means making room for what normally remains on the margins: silence, memory, expectation. His works do not ask to be interpreted as pages of a story, but rather traversed like fragments of an atlas. Each image is a threshold; each threshold opens a new story.

Nico Bonomolo’s painting moves precisely in this liminal space, where what appears is not simply seen, but remembered; it is not only present, but survives. As in an atlas of memory, each work is an autonomous fragment and at the same time part of an invisible web of references and survivals. Storytelling doesn’t tell a story that’s already been written. It tells the story of the moment when a story becomes possible.

Laura Francesca Di Trapani