Nick Mauss exhbition: The Pulverized Poem

Emanuela Campoli is pleased to announce The Pulverized Poem, Nick Mauss’ fifth exhibition with the gallery and his first in Milan.

For his exhibition at 48, Foro Bonaparte, Nick Mauss juxtaposes two mirrored murals and a drawing on paper and voile in an apartment that appears suspended in a state of ambiguous habitation -- not yet, or no longer, lived in or vacated.

Painting behind glass, Mauss enacts procedures of painting in reverse. Line and color, applied in layers on the verso of the transparent support, produce a meshwork of simultaneous description, figuring fragments of bodies in a gestural vocabulary that shuttles between written language, obliteration, and ornamental cipher. Through a process of silvering, the painted glass is rendered reflective, animated by alchemical swarms of silver deposits and halos of oxidization behind the brushmarks. Corresponding and reacting to the given architecture of the space, and bodies that move in it, these works simultaneously invoke decorative interior schemes, early photographic processes, and the psychological function of mirrors in Baroque paintings and noir cinema. But the fraught implication of decorative painting here also functions as a vandalization of the field of vision, as the viewer finds herself implicated in the collapsed space of these painted mirrors, registering a cross-hatching of gazes.

In addition to the mirrored murals, the exhibition includes a paratactic drawing composed of multiple conterminous sheets, seen through a length of voile. Marked with a grid that echoes the sheets of glass, the transparent fabric overlay suggests another interference, or delay, of vision, as much as a sense of fragility and dissolution. “To read this poem,” Maurice Blanchot wrote of René Char’s collection The Pulverized Poem, “is to accept....the experience of a certain breaking up, an experience of separation and discontinuity.”

The Pulverized Poem by Nick Mauss is the third exhibition at Emanuela Campoli in Milan, a space conceived both as a living environment and an exhibition venue. Previous exhibitions include Slippery Orchid by Benni Bosetto and Sec et Metallic by Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann. The exhibitions will converge in an upcoming publication set to be released in 2026.

Nick Mauss’ work is currently on view in dialogue with works by Katinka Bock at Espace Louis Vuitton, Munich, as well as in a two-person exhibition with Ken Okiishi at 303 Gallery, New York.

Institutional exhibitions include Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings, and Narrative Facts, etc. at Kunsthalle Basel (2020), Transmissions, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018), Illuminated Window, Triennale di Milano (2017), Intricate Others, Fundação de Seralves, Porto (2017), and interventions including Transcorporealities at Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2019), Florine Stettheimer at the Lenbachhaus, Munich (2014), and Designing Dreams: a Celebration of Léon Bakst (2016) as well as Eccentrique Bébé at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (2022). A selection of his writings on dance, cinema, fashion, and art, titled Dispersed Events, was recently published by After 8 Books, Paris.