ABC-ARTE is pleased to present Velvet Rage, the solo exhibition by Italian artist Filippo Moroni at the gallery's Milan venue, ABC-ARTE ONE OF, in Via Santa Croce 21.
In this previously unseen series of works, Moroni gives form to an intense and visceral reflection on identity, shame, and desire. Velvet Rage is the place where matter explodes and contracts, exposes itself and protects itself, revealing its inherent ambiguity. The tension between strength and fragility runs throughout the exhibition, staging a physical and emotional conflict that does not seek resolution, but language.
The artist’s creative process begins with an apparently humble material: expanded polyurethane, treated as a living, unruly organism that grows and deforms unpredictably. Moroni does not attempt to tame it; he confronts it in a hand-to-hand struggle—an instinctive gesture that is both challenge and surrender. It is the artist himself—through his physical presence—who inscribes meaning onto the material, though never fully dominating it.
Over this tension, a second, equally central element is layered: velvet. A dense, carnal, ambiguous fabric. Not a mere covering, but a sheath that both protects and betrays. Velvet is wound and remedy, rage held just beneath the surface, a visual and tactile memory of an identity in flux. The material thus becomes mask, skin, emotional armor.
In a constant short-circuit between brutality and delicacy, Moroni’s works present themselves as desiring and vulnerable bodies, marked by exposed physicality. Some pieces bear proper names, as if to evoke the living presence of subjects—or subjectivities—that offer themselves and withdraw from view. His sculptures invite us to remain on that uncertain threshold where the image becomes a mirror, and the viewer is called to question their own identity.
