Untitle Art Miami Beach 2026

This project for Untitled Art Miami brings together Nanni Valentini, Gastone Biggi, Filippo Moroni, and Antonio Kuschnir around a shared reflection on layering, understood both as a material process and as a conceptual structure. Although belonging to different generations and artistic languages, the four artists conceive the artwork as a stratified field in which image, matter, and time are constructed through accumulation, rhythm, and transformation.

In Gastone Biggi’s work, layering unfolds through the repetition of the sign and its relationship with rhythm, light, and time. In the Continui series, the surface is built through sequences of marks that generate a continuous visual flow, where painting develops almost like a musical score. Layering is not merely physical but temporal: a progression of gestures that accumulates into a perceptual field. In the Luci series, this process expands into a more atmospheric and chromatic dimension, where light itself becomes layered, dissolving structure into continuous vibration. His concept of Abstract Realism conceives painting as a space in which reality is filtered through abstract grammars before re-emerging as a stratified visual experience.

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

This sensitivity toward the transformation of matter finds a contemporary continuation in the work of Filippo Moroni. Through velvet, polyurethane, and layered textiles, Moroni creates works that seem to grow physically through accumulation and tension. His manipulated surfaces evoke organic forms suspended between attraction and decay, where layering becomes both a structural and emotional process connected to instability, violence, and regeneration.

In Antonio Kuschnir’s paintings, layering emerges as the construction of the imaginary. His canvases develop through the accumulation of personal memories, archetypes, dreams, and references to the landscape of Rio de Janeiro, transforming the pictorial surface into a space where reality and fantasy coexist without hierarchy. Human figures, animals, natural elements, and mythological beings intertwine in open-ended narratives built through successive layers of images and symbols, inviting viewers to assemble their own interpretations. Painting thus becomes a site of sedimented experience, where each visual layer preserves traces of the unconscious and of an identity in constant transformation.

Together, these four practices demonstrate how layering is not merely a formal strategy but a shared language through which painting, matter, memory, and imagination are continuously constructed, transformed, and reinterpreted.