15-17
05 2026
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25/03/2026
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10/05/2026
Exhibitions
Group exhibition

Sala Nova: I Need Silence

Andrea Festa gallery is pleased to present I NEED SILENCE, a group exhibition bringing together four emerging artists — Miriam Auteri, Gao Xintong, Nikko Mundacruz, and Shuang Jiang in Sala Nova — whose practices explore the threshold between figuration and abstraction, where perception slows and meaning unfolds through ambiguity. Silence, in this context, is not the absence of sound but a condition of attention. It is a space where images resist immediate readability and instead demand duration, proximity, and a heightened sensitivity to surface. The works presented in I NEED SILENCE share a common approach: they do not seek to describe reality, but to suspend it — holding the viewer in a moment where recognition and abstraction coexist.
Across painting, each artist constructs a visual language that operates through reduction, tension, and transformation. Forms emerge from close observation — of the body, of nature, of internal states — only to be progressively destabilised. What begins as something identifiable dissolves into folds, volumes, and chromatic intensities that refuse fixed interpretation. Miriam Auteri’s practice centers on the surface as a site of encounter between vision and matter. Her paintings originate from fragments — vegetal structures, bodily traces — that are condensed into ambiguous forms, oscillating between organic presence and abstraction.
The image becomes a threshold, where the body is both revealed and withheld, never fully accessible. In Gao Xintong’s work, abstraction unfolds as a dynamic system of energy. Drawing from both prehistoric visual languages and Futurist notions of movement, the paintings construct fluid environments where human, botanical, and cosmic elements converge. Through layered lines and saturated color, the works suggest a continuous transformation — a flow in which identity dissolves into a broader, collective rhythm. Nikko Mundacruz approaches painting through the lens of psychological and social experience. His compositions focus on micro-gestures, postures, and moments of quiet introspection, often capturing the subtle tension of human interaction.
These images evoke the suspended state that follows intensity — a silence where emotional and mental energies begin to recalibrate and regenerate. Shuang Jiang’s practice reflects on the interconnectedness of all forms of life. Through sharp lines and fluid structures, her works trace a constant oscillation between fragility and resilience, conflict and harmony. Abstract forms become carriers of a universal energy, suggesting a cosmos in perpetual transformation, where nothing exists in isolation but is continuously reshaped through relation. What unites these practices is a shared resistance to immediacy. Rather than offering images to be consumed, the artists construct spaces of delay — where meaning is not given, but emerges slowly through sustained looking.
In this sense, silence becomes an active force: a condition that allows the image to unfold beyond representation, into something more tactile, more intimate, and ultimately more uncertain.