Untitle Art Miami Beach 2026

This presentation for Untitled Art Miami brings together Nanni Valentini, Gastone Biggi, Filippo Moroni, and Bernardo Liu through a shared investigation into layering as both a material process and a conceptual structure. Across generations and radically different practices, the four artists approach the artwork as a stratified field where image, matter, and time are constructed through accumulation, rhythm, and transformation.

In Gastone Biggi’s work, layering is articulated through the repetition of the sign and its relation to rhythm, light, and time. In the Continui, the surface is built through sequences of marks that generate a continuous visual flow, where painting unfolds almost like a musical score. The layering is not only physical but temporal: a progression of gestures that accumulates into a field of perception. In the Luci, this process opens to a more atmospheric and chromatic dimension, where light itself becomes stratified, dissolving structure into vibration. Biggi’s notion of Realismo Astratto positions painting as a space where reality is filtered through abstract grammars, re-emerging as a layered experience of vision.

If Biggi constructs the surface through rhythm and sign, Valentini expands layering into the realm of matter. In works such as the Garze and Trasparenze, gauze, pigment, and ceramic elements overlap in translucent veils that blur the boundary between painting and sculpture. His surfaces are porous and fragile, where layering becomes an act of excavation: material holds memory, and the image seems to emerge from within it, suspended between concealment and revelation.

This sensitivity to material transformation finds a contemporary continuation in Filippo Moroni. Working with velvet, polyurethane, and layered fabrics, Moroni creates works that physically grow through accumulation and tension. His manipulated surfaces evoke organic forms suspended between attraction and decay, where layering becomes both a structural and emotional process tied to instability, violence, and regeneration.

For Bernardo Liu, layering unfolds as a process tied to memory and cultural displacement. His paintings are conceived as “affective tapestries,” where images, objects, and symbols—porcelain figures, domestic elements, and graphic patterns—accumulate as fragments of personal and collective histories. Though entirely painterly, his works resemble visual collages, built through overlapping strata that partially obscure and reveal one another. The surface becomes a space where different temporalities and geographies coexist, reflecting a diasporic condition in which Eastern heritage is not fixed but continuously transformed within contemporary life. In this sense, layering becomes a form of cultural sedimentation, where memory persists as trace, echo, and unstable presence.

Together, these four practices reveal layering not simply as a formal strategy but as a shared language through which painting, matter, and memory are continuously constructed, transformed, and reimagined.