ABC-ARTE is pleased to present Velvet Rage, the first solo exhibition by Italian artist Filippo Moroni, held at the gallery's Milan location, ABC-ARTE ONE OF, via Santa Croce 21. In this new series of works, Moroni gives shape to an intense and visceral reflection on identity, shame, and desire. Velvet Rage is the space where matter bursts and contracts, reveals and shields itself, showing its full ambiguity. The tension between strength and fragility runs throughout the exhibition, staging a physical and emotional conflict that seeks not resolution, but a language. The artist’s creative process begins with a seemingly humble material: expanded polyurethane, treated as a living, unruly organism that grows and deforms unpredictably. Moroni doesn’t seek 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 into the material, without ever fully dominating it. Layered onto this tension is a second, equally central element: velvet. A dense, sensual, ambiguous fabric. Not merely a covering, but a shell that conceals and simultaneously betrays. Velvet is wound and healing, rage held beneath the surface, a tactile and visual memory of an identity in flux. The material thus becomes mask, skin, emotional armor. In a continuous short circuit between brutality and delicacy, Moroni’s works appear as desiring and vulnerable bodies, marked by exposed physicality. Some of the pieces bear personal names, as if to evoke the living presence of subjects – or subjectivities – that offer themselves and retreat from the gaze. His sculptures invite us to linger at that uncertain threshold where the image becomes a mirror, and the viewer is called to question their own identity.
