Opening Filippo Moroni - Velvet Rage
ABC-ARTE is pleased to present Velvet Rage, a new solo exhibition by Italian artist Filippo Moroni, opening on Thursday, September 25, 2025, at the Milan location of the gallery, ABC-ARTE ONE OF, via Santa Croce 21.
In this new body of work, Moroni gives form to a visceral and corporeal reflection on identity, shame, and desire. Velvet Rage is the space where matter bursts and contracts, exposes and shields itself, revealing its ambiguity. The tension between strength and fragility runs through the exhibition, staging a physical and emotional confrontation that seeks not resolution, but expression.
The artist's creative process begins with an apparently mundane material: expanding polyurethane foam, treated here as a living, unruly organism that grows and deforms unpredictably. Moroni does not seek to tame it-he confronts it in a physical struggle, a visceral gesture that is both challenge and surrender. It is the artist himself-through his bodily presence-who imbues the material with meaning, without ever fully controlling it.
Velvet Rage will be on view from September 25 to November 15, 2025, at ABC-ARTE ONE OF, Milan.
The opening will take place on Thursday, September 25, starting at 6:30 PM.
Over this tension, a second element is layered: velvet. A dense, carnal, and ambiguous fabric. Not merely a covering, but a skin that both conceals and reveals. Velvet is a held-back rage, a tenderness that wounds, a visual and tactile memory of an identity in flux. The material becomes mask, skin, emotional armor.
In a continuous short-circuit between brutality and tenderness, Moroni’s works appear as desiring and vulnerable bodies, marked by an exposed physicality. Some of the pieces bear personal names, evoking the living presence of subjects—or subjectivities—that offer themselves to the viewer while remaining elusive. His sculptures invite us to remain at that uncomfortable threshold where the image becomes a mirror, and the viewer is asked to confront their own identity.
