EN_Nessuno saprà mai dei sogni del cane

27/01/2026

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14/03/2026

Exhibitions

Jacopo Casadei

Nessuno saprà mai dei sogni del cane

Testo critico di Maria Vittoria Pinotti

Richter Fine Art opens 2026 by presenting the first solo exhibition of Jacopo Casadei (Cesena, 1982). The exhibition, entitled Nessuno saprà mai dei sogni del cane, accompanied by a critical text by Maria Vittoria Pinotti, opens on Tuesday, January 27 at 6. 30pm and will be on view until March 13, 2026. In a period of reevaluation of contemporary painting, often characterized by strong figurativism, the project proposes a reflection on a new, evocative form of painting based on peculiar timbral effects, in which the presence or suggestion of an image asserts the principle of an autonomous practice. These are the elements that define Jacopo Casadei’s research, for whom a work does not necessarily need to represent something, is not subordinate to a narrative, and does not require a degree of technical completeness, thus remaining open to any possible form of interpretation.

Due to the artist’s inexhaustible inventiveness, the works on display, dating from 2025, combine balance, a subtle ironic vein, and a deeply investigative approach to his own impressions and visions, granting the oils an evocative value of personal sensations, suspended between the haziness typical of a dream and the concreteness of the mark. In this way, for Casadei, painting does not merely represent the visible but makes an experience perceptible. Thus, when recognizable figures emerge, they arise from an expressiveness that is not fully declared. Titles are particularly significant for Casadei, always assigned after the completion of a painting, as they offer additional interpretative keys, allowing viewers to read the figures and grasp their harmony beyond the mere visual experience.

The exhibition’s title is also especially notable, as Casadei states: «The title refers in a very simple and ironic way to a condition analogous to living painting, particularly to that process, both necessary and unnecessary, of explaining the gesture, the intention, the path, the vision. In many cases, all of this represents the inevitable effort that precedes the work, in which the painter is both author and, at the same time, silent witness to the crime». This reflection highlights, with simplicity and sarcasm, a typical condition of contemporary painting: the constant need to justify or explain what is created, whereas the work possesses an iconic and suggestive character on its own, independent of any pretentious digression.

A unifying element of the works on display is their format: the artist mainly works on small and medium-sized canvases. This choice suggests a research conducted in a concentrated, dense, and intimate space. The work is created through rapid gestures; this speed and immediacy, not requiring technical perfection, generates a liberated grammar, composed of soft shapes, filiform strokes, and imprecise halos that teem across the canvas’s spatial content. Thus, when an image emerges, it detaches from the background like an apparition: the structure is composed of a richness of chromatic tones, complemented by compositional freedom and organization of forms, where emptiness emerges as a fundamental constructive element.

Figurative subjects, although fragile and evanescent, seem to live their own metaphysical story within the small physicality of the painting. In this sense, like a technical procedure that instills doubt, what may appear incomplete to the viewer is already complete, while what seems more defined may represent the result of a deliberately extreme simplicity.