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Giona Maiarelli is a visual artist and art director, born in Milan and based in New York. Co-founder of the agency Maiarelli Studio, he studied in Italy and the United States, then with the renowned graphic designer Milton Glaser, whose studio he later joined. Since 2016, Giona has been paying more attention to his artistic practice, creating and exhibiting primarily collages. He works with images found in bookstores or in pages of the New York Times. His work explores the physical and social landscape of America. He extracts fragments of photographs from their original context and creates unexpected relationships with other visual elements, transforming them into ambiguous and often poetic observations. This new series originates from the Italian design and architecture magazine Domus, founded by Gio Ponti in 1928. A stack of these old magazines was given to him, and from there, a slightly different kind of inspiration than his usual themes was born. Domus, the Latin term for House, is the place where memory resides. Giona Maiarelli later adds other images from books on geology. The vision and questions then expand from the domestic life to the landscape and to "our home," the Earth. The impact of industrialized societies on this shared habitat is part of the reflection. The images in the Domus exhibition are scanned and printed on high-quality fine art paper and worked with gouache with quartzite inclusion. Opening night on Thursday, October 22 at Galerie Oblique Nuage, from 5 PM to 9 PM Galerie Oblique Nuage, 19 rue de la Mare, 75020 Paris The Domus exhibition will then be open Wednesday to Sunday from 3 PM to 7 PM until November 1.

Là où marchent les dieux is Abel Burger’s new solo exhibition in Brussels. This exhibition is part of an eponymous project currently in development that will take various artistic forms: film, books, drawings, and more. Starting September 19, we will present a selection of drawings and paintings created over the past few months. These works were created under different skies. They are milestones in the quest that has led Abel down these paths and brought her face-to-face with the solitude of ancient temples and the fervor of Orthodox chapels, in an intimate search for what the sacred still means. We conceived this exhibition together with the intention of inviting visitors to open their eyes to the invisible and to embark on a transformative experience. (...) Abel Burger is both a creator and a discoverer: her hand gives form to what her intuition perceives of invisible worlds. She clears the way and builds at the same time, feeling her way through a territory and a memory that reveal themselves to her in fragments. Her drawings are spaces where signs, gestures, and beliefs overlap and interconnect. Around fragmentary traces and ritual scenes, a non-linear narrative unfolds: it winds its way from one plane to another, from one time to another. From paper etched with furrows and scars and caressed by pigments, she unearths vestiges and rearranges them into a narrative with shifting contours that gradually reveals itself in each of her drawings. This body of work is constructed through all her pieces, like a vast epic in which each drawing constitutes a chapter of the story. With tenderness, Abel is, in turn, a conqueror, a builder, a zealous archivist, and a loving witness to the faith expressed through the repeated gestures of a thousand tiny figures. She is also the intercessor between humans and the gods, carrying the hope of the former and the response of the latter. Better yet: she opens a passage, making her drawings the place where humans and the gods can meet. (...) Justine Jacquemin, 2026

Courtesy of the artist and Galerie la Ferronnerie

Courtesy of the artist and Galerie la Ferronnerie

Courtesy of the artist and Galerie la Ferronnerie

Carlo Zinelli was born at San Giovanni Lupatoto (Verona) in 1916. He was only two years old when his mother died. When he was nine, his father, a carpenter, sent him to work on a farm. Carlo later became a butcher’s apprentice at the municipal abattoirs in Verona. During this time he began to engage in art. During the Second World War he enlisted in an alpine platoon. After having served for two months as a volunteer in Spanish Civil War, he was sent home due to poor health. He started to have psychological problem. Between 1941 and 1947, he spent both time in psychiatric wards and at work. Then he was admitted to the San Giacomo psychiatric hospital in Verona. He initially did drawings on the floor and created scratched pictures on the walls. In 1957 he was accepted into the graphic design studio founded by Michael Noble. Here, until the hospital closing in 1969, he produced almost 3000 pictures, mainly gouaches with works on both sides, consisting of silhouettes of stylized people and animals. He died in 1974. One of the first artist in the Jean Dubuffet collection, his pictures can be viewed in many international private and public collections.

Pietro Ghizzardi was born in Viadana (Mantua) in 1906 into a poor family of farmers. As day labourers, his parents are constantly on the move, and his childhood is one of deprivation. He is also a sickly child and, as a result, his schooling was patchy. The Ghizzardi family only put down roots in 1931, when they settle in Boretto (Reggio Emilia). The River Po burst its banks in a great flood twenty years later, marking a turning point in Pietro’s life: he decides to devote himself fully to art and to write the story of his life (“Mi richordo anchora”, with Cesare Zavattini notes, Einaudi, 1976 which wins the “Premio letterario di Viareggio”, 1977). He finds in panting the way to enjoy life and to reveal his unconscious attraction for the female universe. Ghizzardi paints on used cardboards, in both sides, using unconventional materials, coal, triturate bricks, earths, ochre, berries and herbs. Pietro paints portraits of his family, saints, wild animals, and above all women, some inspired by movie stars. He dies in 1986.

Raffaele Capuana was born in 1947 in Carlentini, in Catania province, the youngest of three children. Her father Santi painted for passion but her mother Luigia decides to leave Sicily and move to Milan to remove her children from a difficult relationship with her husband. Raffaele suffers a lot for this estrangement from his father to whom he will remain tied for life. In Milan, Raffaele attended school up to the eighth grade, spontaneously starting to paint. In 1967, during his military service, he began to show mental problems. In 1968 he found work at the post office and he got married. He has two sons. He works during the day painting at night but the deprivation of sleep worsens his state of health. In 1980 he enrolled into a drawing course for amateur painters at the Brera Academy. He lives and works in a basement in Sesto San Giovanni, his marriage is in crisis. Even if the instability will characterize his extramarital affairs. In 1994 he retired early to devote himself full time to painting but he was forced to leave his beloved home-studio to move to Cusano Milanino. In the move, many of his paintings are lost. First the divorce, then a series of painful events hit Capuana: the death of his mother, of his second son Tiziano and his brother Salvatore who had always supported him. Through painting begins a reflection on death and decay (the small self-portraits). In 2000 he managed to return to the basement of Sesto San Giovanni where he isolated himself and worked hard. Abuse of psychoactive drugs and cigarettes forced him to multiple hospitalizations in psychiatric hospital between 2005 and 2016. In 2017 he moved to Piedmont cared for by his ex partner Vanna and his daughter Silvia because he could no longer live alone. He gets back to good health but in 2019 he suffers a heart attack and dies.

Samaneh Atef is a self-taught Iranian visual artist, born in 1989 in Iran. Based in France since 2020, she explores the body, memory, and dreams through drawing and painting. She is currently in residence at the Cité internationale des arts in Montmartre, Paris, through the Académie des beaux-arts programme, until June 2027.

Davide Cicolani was born in Rome on July 8 1978. His childhood is quite difficult. At the age of six he was struck by lightning. The following year, due to nephritis, he was hospitalized for six months. During his long hospital stay he begins to draw. At 18, after graduating as a surveyor, he began working at night as a factory worker. Thus, during the day, he can devote himself entirely to art. A free spirit. After 10 years he resigned and moved to Paris, where he continued to paint, moving from one squat house to another. In 2016, life in the French capital began to hold him tight and he returned to Italy, preferring a life in the countryside, more in contact with nature. A caravan in Circeo as home. Cicolani prefers recycled materials such as road maps, project drawings and old accounting records. Or recycled paper. On these supports already loaded with memory, the artist superimposes arabesques of Indian ink, powerful graphic stylistic features and dreamlike and disturbing figures, sometimes realized with inlays of color similar to those of the ancient stained glass windows. Traces, weaves, portraits, his works have great graphic power.

Antonio Di Paola was born in Palermo in 2000. At 17, while attending the Accounting Institute, he began drawing spontaneously and continuously. He later honed his technical skills, graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo in 2022 with a degree in “Environmental Art and Experimental Languages.” He just received his Master’s Degree in Painting from the same Academy. Antonio paints fearsome characters, equipped with claws, sharp teeth, electric tails, and broadswords, the fruit of the artist’s sensitivity and overflowing imagination, which he seeks to control through form and colour. His personal unease is mirrored in the anxiety of the so-called Generation Z of digital natives, fueled by the frenzy of video games and social media. His works are like mirrors that reflect the obsessions of his inner self, but they also evoke our fragility in the face of natural disasters, ongoing wars, and the epidemics of yesterday and today. To create his works, Di Paola uses an original combination of techniques, including watercolor, acrylic, oil pastels, pencil crayons, pigments, and ecoline, bringing to life his eccentric fantasy world, teeming with ever-changing characters.

Aldo Ordavo (Viareggio, 1913 – Viareggio, 1991) was an Italian painter and sculptor associated with the naïve art movement. Born and raised in Viareggio, Tuscany, he developed an artistic career defined by an intimate, folk-inspired visual language. His works are celebrated for their poetic, spontaneous quality and vibrant use of color. He frequently depicted landscapes, scenes of everyday life, female figures immersed in nature, as well as flowers and animals. Exhibitions and Awards He participated in significant events within the field, including the National Prize for Naïve Painting in Luzzara (Reggio Emilia), where several of his works—such as "La Villomella"—became part of notable local collections.

Arthur Devisscher (1996) is a Belgian artist from Bruges. After intially studying psychology, he ultimately chose art and earned his degree in illustration from LUCA School of Arts in Ghent in 2022. His work is distinguished by a rich visual language full of lines, overlapping textures, and meticulous details. Devisscher constructs his drawings intuitively: he starts with an idea or image and allows the work to develop as he draws. His scenes are often imaginative and poetic, with nature and animals playing a prominent role, interacting with human figures. Devisscher's work invites slow viewing, where every detail seems to tell its own story. His visual world is layered, intuitive, and full of wonder.

Maldo Nollimerg tells us myths with universal accents, tales of fights and dances between animals, humans and everything that can hybridize in between. These edifying sketches, often staged between theatrical curtains (or are they the eyelids of those who dream these images?), seem - under the air of false naivety - to initiate us into mysteries. This is what Maldo Nollimerg's drawings offer, this part of secrecy and sensitivity, of unveiling and rewriting oneself and the world.

Abel Burger (b. 1982) is a self-taught artist whose practice combines drawing, painting, and writing. Their work explores the connections between dream, memory, and the sacred, in a sensitive dialogue between the visible and the invisible. Fragmented like the remnants of a forgotten language, their oeuvre is nourished by myths, history, and ancient traditions—from the Mediterranean to the Orient—and their research questions processes of intimate and spiritual transformation. Their work is regularly exhibited in Europe and the United States and is included in several public and museum collections.

Courtesy of the artist and Galerie la Ferronnerie

Courtesy of the artist and Galerie la Ferronnerie

Courtesy of the artist and Galerie la Ferronnerie

The exhibition features around forty small-format Naïve works from the Dino Menozzi collection. They have been described as innocent, dreamers, prophets of the past, and primitive. Yet the phenomenon of Naïve art is far from homogeneous. As Cesare Zavattini (...) points out, there is a strong presence of ‘idyllic painting’, when ‘nature is seen as an ideal place of peace and serenity’. Zavattini writes in the preface to “I Naïfs italiani”, “artists are not farmers but office workers, laborers, housewives’. Theirs is an ‘approximate’ nature that lacks ‘vegetal truth’. If the painter is a farmer, he is not inclined to idyllic painting. ‘Its nature is richer and more vital’ Zavattini continues, ‘the whole is less dreamy and full of earthly moods… We are faced with a strong, elemental realism’. (...) Most critics of the period agree on one point: overall, Naïve art urges us to reconnect with nature, and thus with ourselves. Due to space constraints, we will not delve here into the 28 artists‘ biographies. (...) Among the most striking are the dreamlike compositions of Enrico Benassi (Casale di Mezzani, 1902 – Parma, 1978); the almost surreal imprint of Mario Bortolami‘s images (Voltabarozzo, Padua, 1924 – 2001); the bold descriptions of hilltop villages that form the backdrop to the memories of festivals and popular traditions of Giuseppe Gagliano (Centuripe, Enna, 1897 – Catania, 1985); the delicate rural poetry, rendered with meticulous detail by Rodolfo Macca (Gualtieri, 1936); the formal elegance in representing urban structures by Lina Muzzi (Bologna, 1929 – n.p.); the atmospheres of ancient castles by Stanislao Ponzi, known as Nello (S. Maria del Piano, Parma, 1897 – 1984); the robust and essential, almost harsh, depiction of the human figure by Toni Roggeri (Pieve Modolena, Reggio Emilia, 1927 – 2003); and finally the particularity in delineating people always with their heads bowed by Serafino Valla (Luzzara, 1919 – Reggiolo, 2014): a way to express the weight of his suffered vicissitudes but also humble submission to the divinity.

Courtesy of the artist and Galerie la Ferronnerie

Courtesy of the artist and Galerie la Ferronnerie

Courtesy of the artist and Galerie la Ferronnerie

I am delighted to announce the opening of our next exhibition this Sunday, May 10, from 2 to 6 pm. It will feature works on paper by Solange Knopf and Maria Ñíguez, as well as ceramics by Antoine Moulinard. “Les veilleurs” (“The watchers”) is an exhibition of works imbued with a powerful presence. The pieces are otherworldly and gothic, as if plucked from a castle haunted by ghosts and swept by drafts. Maria Ñíguez (Spain, 1997), whom we are delighted to present for the first time at the gallery, draws strange scenes—both external and internal—in pencil or pastel. Her taciturn characters guide us by the flickering light of candles through a labyrinth of secrets and illusions. Justine Jacquemin