Ascoli Piceno, Italy — The Associazione Arte Contemporanea Picena, Fainplast, and the Comune di Ascoli Piceno present L’anno del Serpente [The Snake’s year], a solo exhibition by Paola Angelini, winner of the fifth edition of the Premio Osvaldo Licini by Fainplast. The prize recognizes contemporary painting that pushes the boundaries of the language, rewarding practices that renew the field in meaningful ways.
Running from December 13, 2025, to March 15, 2026, at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Osvaldo Licini in Ascoli Piceno, the show emerges from a decisive biographical moment in Angelini’s life: the loss of her father, a central and enduring presence in her life and practice. The entire exhibition is dedicated to him, and from this fracture unfolds a year of deep transformation in which painting becomes the site for confronting absence and charting a turning point between a “before” and an “after.”
The title draws inspiration from Year of the Snake, Arcade Fire’s song reflecting the Chinese calendar, which Angelini musicalizes in her studio as a quasi-daily ritual. The rhythm marks the threshold-crossing where a new perimeter redefines existence and painting changes direction, raising the question of how to be reborn within absence.
Angelini builds the show as a stratified painting-body, more a fleet of lifeboats than a set of fixed landings. She does not seek simplification; instead, she accumulates elements, signs, and images that recur like refrains: heads, angels, moons, figures, and landscapes composing a personal lexicon capable of holding dream, memory, and presence together.
The exhibition unfolds in three layers, mirroring the construction of a painting: priming (imprimitura), sketch (bozzetto), and finish (finitura). In the priming phase, affective and artistic binders come to the fore, where symbol and portrait coincide. Works such as What is Orange? Why, an Orange, just an Orange! function as time machines, drawing from a family archive two figures facing the viewer, suspended between a vibrantly orange light and an even, exterior illumination. Portraits of Angelini herself dialogue with two historical portraits of Nanny, a key figure in Licini’s universe, weaving a path of intersecting presences in which the observer and the observed continually exchange places.
The second layer, the sketch, is the most experimental. Angelini allows only partial control over the direction of images and lets the painting occupy space as in Dove where we go?—a work that overlaps an entire wall and poses the question of which path to follow. In this piece, abstraction and figuration trade places, producing a sense of open-ended inquiry where the way forward is never fully mapped. On the back wall, drawings made in situ fuse gesture with elevation: the charcoal mark, fragile and honest, makes visible its own journey as if the arms that traced it were still moving. In the same space, Giovanna Garzoni’s small skull—a seventeenth-century Angolana miniaturist’s work—speaks as a memento mori to the large canvas Dove where we go?, introducing reflection on endings within a transformative process.
In the finishing layer, five tall, self-supporting paintings populate the room, vertical bodies that convey layers of memory and change. Each work differs in construction, atmosphere, and density of mark: irregular surfaces, overlaid colors and grafismo, alternating luminous zones with lunar presences. The moon, together with angels and surface fractures, returns as a guide and companion, illuminating the tension between the longing to ascend and the weight of matter—an echo of Licini’s teaching. In one painting, deep greens and hot pinks frame a single watchful gaze among faces with closed eyes, while a flying angel attempts to restrain a head that nature’s green might pursue as a trace. On the ground, a raft-like form gathers the faces of Leopardi among wreckage—poet both beloved to Licini and to Angelini.
The layering of signs and forms animating Angelini’s works defines the overall architecture of the show. It unfolds through the imprimitura of the figures that look back at us, the bozzetto where the search for a path intersects with the impulse to fly, and the finitura where these presences finally take shape in the five self-supporting paintings. This stratification is not born of fear of emptiness or a compulsion to accumulate; rather, it is the act by which the artist traverses her journey through absence and her father’s memory. The exhibition offers a non-linear promenade, a deliberately wandering exploration in which gaze and mind travel through what might have been the ruins of a future cut short—the ruins never born. In this open space that welcomes misdirection and uncertainty, the moonlight reveals the exact fusion of fragility and strength.
Paola Angelini was born in San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy, in 1983. She earned her painting degree in 2010 from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. In 2011 she attended the Visual Arts workshop at IUAV University of Venice, led by Bjarne Melgaard, and that same year participated in the Norwegian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in the Baton Sinister exhibition. In 2017 she earned a Master of Fine Arts at KASK Conservatorium in Ghent, Belgium. In 2014 and 2016 she participated in artist residencies at Nordic Artists’ Centre Dale (Norway) and Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice. Her solo and group exhibitions span Italy and abroad, including Forme del tempo (Prato, 2017); La conquista dello spazio (Urbino, 2017); Iconoclash (Verona, 2017); Rethinking Media (Oslo, 2018); Babel of Bric-à-brac (Stavanger, 2019); Splendor Solis (Pesaro, 2021); Black Morning (Lyles & King, New York, 2022); Il tuffatore (Fondazione Coppola, Vicenza, 2023); Became a sun on the left side of the moon (Stavanger, 2024); Image outside of time (Hong Kong, 2024). Her ongoing practice continues to explore memory, absence, and the process of painting as a space for transformation.
Photo credits: Associazione Arte Contemporanea Picena
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