Recycling Life | Solo exhibition by Maria Silvia Da Re

Recycling Life

Solo exhibition by Maria Silvia Da Re

Introduction by: Prof. Elio Franzini

Opening: Wednesday, April 29, 2026, 6:30 PM

Recycling Life , a solo exhibition by Maria Silvia Da Re , opens at the MA-EC Gallery on Wednesday, April 29. The exhibition will be introduced at 6:30 pm, together with the artist, by Elio Franzini , philosopher and professor of Aesthetics at the University of Milan.

The elegant rooms of Palazzo Durini will feature ten large-scale works, all created in 2025, and the installation Contains Poetry. Regarding this installation, Daniel Leuwers writes: “The reliquary that Maria Silvia Da Re installs above the padlocked books demonstrates that at the foot of a manuscript page there are keys capable of opening all padlocks. Contains Poetry reveals that poetry manifests itself at the intersection of its death and its resurrection. It becomes a presence that is random, suspended, and therefore crucial, like the last breath or its double.” For Gianluca Bocchinfuso, however, Contains Poetry represents the culmination of the fusion between object and verse, creating a physical and mental space that invites contemplation and silence. It is the materialization of an idea that runs through Da Re's entire oeuvre: art as a treasure chest that contains and protects the precious fragility of memory and poetry.

"Maria Silvia Da Re's work," writes Bocchinfuso, "appears as a profound and meticulous investigation into the concept of 'genetic memory.'" The artist does not simply represent the past: she evokes it, reconstructs it, and interrogates it through a practice that takes on the contours of a true archaeology of memory. Her work is a process of excavation, a careful search among everyday objects, time-worn documents, and faded photographs to uncover narratives that intertwine the personal and collective spheres. Fragments of existence, relics of family experiences, and traces of anonymous stories are decontextualized and recomposed into new constellations of meaning, transforming into powerful containers of significance. The material of the past, in her hands, becomes a language for speaking about the present. The Genetic Memory series constitutes an important point in her artistic research. In these works, conceived as display cases or time boxes, the artist assembles personal relics and recurring symbols to explore the themes of heredity, identity, and the stratification of memory. Family and personal history. Da Re's style can be defined through the metaphor of the theater of memory. His display cases and panels are not simple containers, but rather micro-stages where fragments of the past are presented, orchestrated according to a direction that transforms the chaos of the artifacts into poetic order. This coherence is the result of precise technical and stylistic choices, which constitute his unique and recognizable visual language. His works are not simple collections of memorabilia. They are poetic devices, time machines that invite us to pause and listen to the silent stories of the objects. In this way, they encourage us to undertake our own archaeological excavation into the territories of memory, in search of that visual legacy that, consciously or unconsciously, defines who we are.

As the exhibition unfolds through the display cases, the viewer encounters what Stefano Zuffi defines as a grand, comprehensive operation, in which each individual element of the sequence takes on value and significance relative to the whole, resulting in a powerful overall effect. As Zuffi states in the catalog's critical essay, Maria Silvia Da Re, in capturing her fish-memories and transforming them into wall installations, had to perform a forceful, and intrinsically dramatic, act: to pull memories from the calm waters of oblivion, where they were slipping away, lost to the depths, and offer them to us in a form of contemporary "still life" that, upon closer inspection, is also a fragment of a self-portrait spanning generations, that stretch of DNA the artist refers to with the adjective "genetics" she uses to describe memory.

Maria Silvia Da Re is the author of numerous critical articles, particularly on contemporary French poetry, and of the essays "Yves Bonnefoy: il Cuore-spazio ei testi giovanili" (Alinea, 2000), with an interview with the poet republished in France (Éditions Léo Scheer, 2001, Mercure de France, 2008), and "La bocca immagina. I poteri della traduzione artistica" (Mimesis, 2014), in which literary translation is also examined from a philosophical perspective, as well as on the basis of her actual translation activity for publishing in various genres (from 2003 to 2014, she also held a workshop on the theoretical and practical aspects of translation at the University of Milan). His poetic texts in Italian and French have appeared, among others, in Bulletin de l'Aicl (Association Internationale de la Critique Littéraire, 1, 2015), and in Les poètes de l'Aicl: une anthologie (2018); for Zacinto Edizioni, he published the volume of serialized poems Versimail (2022), and the collection Pulchra. Libro prismatico (2024), a book of three "visuals", with his poems and an "erratic tale", the essay La verticale e l'onda by co-author Elio Franzini, on aesthetic creation, and the counterpoint of Jean-Luc Coudray's original drawings to the poetic texts. As an artist, she has participated in several group exhibitions and fairs, including the Affordable Art Fair (2015), the Genoa Biennale (2017), ArteGenova (2020), and the Rome Triennale of Visual Arts (2021). In 2020, she exhibited her works at the MA-EC Gallery in Milan and in its virtual extension Wepresentart. In 2020, she was included in the De Agostini Atlas of Contemporary Art. She was selected as an artist (painting section) for the 2021 Combat Prize. In 2026, she held a solo exhibition in Bergamo.

Event coordinates :

Title: Recycling Life.

Solo exhibition by Maria Silvia Da Re

Introduction by Elio Franzini

Critical text in the catalog by Stefano Zuffi

Opening: Wednesday, April 29, 2026, 6:30 PM

Location: MA-EC Gallery Palazzo Durini, Via Santa Maria Valle 2, Milan

Opening hours: Tuesday-Friday 10:00-13:00 and 15:00-19:00; Saturday 15:00-19:00

Until May 7, 2026

Info: info.milanart@gmail.com

0239831335

IG @maecgallery

MA-EC Gallery

Via Santa Maria Valle 2, Milan

www.ma-ec.it