ArtNoble Gallery presents Gallística, a project by Pietro Fachini in dialogue with a work by Renato Guttuso from the Collezione Ramo, as part of Milano Drawing Week 2025.
The exhibition stems from a residency that Pietro Fachini spent in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, together with his friend and fellow artist Kevin Niggeler, where the two came into contact with the world of fighting cocks. Starting from an anthropological impulse — to study the bond between humans and animals and the cultural forms of ritualized violence — the artist develops a reflection on the idea of the raw as both an existential and perceptual condition. His investigation grapples with a fundamental question: what rela-tionship exists between public opinion and the violent, ruthless products of local cultural practices? During his field research alongside Memo — a trainer and breeder active for thirty-six years in Oaxaca, the second poorest state in Mexico — Fachini observed how a single gesture can instantly erase time and effort, giving concrete form to the idea of the raw. Drawing from life in pueblos and breeding farms, the artist confronts the fine line that separates life from death, and the sudden disappearance of value in a single blow.
This conceptual core takes shape in a series of red chalk studies and intaglio impressions of defeated fighting cocks, created in 2024 and presented in dialogue alongside a 1974 drawing on paper by Renato Guttuso. The dialogue between the two does not hinge on formal continuity but on a shared conviction: that drawing is a tool of direct investigation, capable of translating lived experience into image without rhetorical mediation. Where Guttuso’s observation of reality carried a civic and explicitly political charge, Fachini’s gaze is empathetic and analytical, seeking to understand context before forming judg-ment. Both, however, share a common horizon: an art that engages reality head-on, con-veying its complexity without neutralizing it.
Guttuso’s work serves as the historical anchor of the project. In the immediacy of its mark and the clarity of its line, it reaffirms drawing’s role as a stance toward reality — a lesson in lucidity and responsibility that Fachini’s practice brings into the present.
The collaboration with Collezione Ramo forms part of the fifth edition of Milano Drawing Week 2025 (November 22–30, 2025), a citywide program of exhibitions and dialogues between twentieth- and twenty-first-century works on paper, presented across galleries and institutions throughout Milan.
PIETRO FACHINI
Born in Milan in 1994.
Born in Milan, Pietro Fachini is an Italian artist who works across different countries de-pending on the nature of his projects.
He approached painting in 2017 while attending the studio of Maestro Maurizio Bottoni, entering into dialogue with the Flemish tradition and metaphysical art. At the same time, in Urbino, he met Professor Marco Fantuzzi, with whom he deepened his understanding of pigments and the raw materials used to produce color. From this formative crossroads emerged a radical attention to the materiality of painting and a pursuit—across continen-ts and cultures—of the relationship between human beings and color.
Today, Fachini conducts studies on coloring earths in Sardinia and focuses especially on organic colors in both the Colombian Amazon rainforest and Mexico. In Latin America, with the support of local communities, he investigates methods to stabilize organic dyes and explores traditional indigenous techniques—such as canvases made from the fibers of specific Amazonian jungle trees. Immersion in research sites and proximity to etholo-gical and biological studies have led Fachini to approach sound practice, broadening the range of media he employs and giving his artistic language a synesthetic and ecological dimension.
In 2024, he held his first solo exhibition, Racconti dalle terre piumate, curated by Arnold Braho, at ArtNoble Gallery in Milan. That same year, he was selected among the twenty finalists of the Premio Cairo and exhibited in the finalists’ show at Palazzo della Perma-nente (Milan). Also in 2024, he presented works in Seoul at My Story Gallery, in collabora-tion with High Art Paris and Sister Galerie.
His practice has also been nourished by on-site research residencies: the Art Residency in Oaxaca (Mexico, 2024) and the Tagli Residency in Stromboli (Italy, 2023)—moments that strengthened the connection between the pictorial process, the geography of materials, and local knowledge.
RENATO GUTTUSO
Born in Bagheria in 1911. Died in Rome in 1987
Renato Guttuso was an Italian painter and politician. He is considered to be among the most important Italian artists of the 20th century and is among the key figures of Italian expressionism. His art is characterized by social and political commentary, and as a mem-ber of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) he became its senator for two legislatures, from 1976 to 1983, during Enrico Berlinguer’s secretariat.
His best-known works include Flight from Etna (1938–39), Crucifixion (1941), and La Vucciria (1974). Guttuso also designed for the theatre (including sets and costumes for Histoire du Soldat, Rome, 1940) and did illustrations for books. A fierce anti-Fascist, he developed out of expressionism and the harsh light of his native land to paint landscapes and social commentary.
