AGOSTINO IACURCI

AGOSTINO IACURCI
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

11 September - 24 October 2026

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow takes its title from Kurt Vonnegut's short story of the same name, set in a future where ageing and death can be suspended. The result is not eternity but a stubborn congestion of domestic space: no one gives up their place, space ceases to renew itself, and generations continue to accumulate within the spaces of everyday life. Agostino Iacurci approaches the still life as a territory of persistence of images.

Vases, chairs, lamps, plants and everyday utensils, which have survived more than fifteen moves between home and studio over the past ten years, have become a repertoire of recurring images. While in ordinary life these objects bear the marks of wear and apples forgotten in the studio before a journey quickly decay, painting reasserts their formal fullness, almost sculptural, restoring them through a form sedimented by a long familiarity of looking. Colour follows the same logic. At times it adheres to reality; at others it departs from it radically, guided solely by painterly necessity. It does not coincide with the objects' natural colour but spreads across the surface of the painting as a series of energetic fields, measuring weight, rhythm and the relationships between forms. Colour does not describe the world; it constructs the space in which things continue to exist.

The reference to Giorgio Morandi, an essential figure in the Bolognese painting tradition, is inevitable. Yet where his painting tends toward concentration and reduction, Iacurci expands the scale of the still life, giving it a monumental gravity. Objects acquire the weight of architecture, while the tabletop unfolds into the scale of a landscape.

This spatial impulse extends onto the gallery walls through a monumental wall painting. Saturated fields of pink, green and orange redraw the space into a sequence of wings and perspectival boxes, while a bright yellow envelops the central pillars and passageways. The painted architecture interacts with the existing structure, revealing misalignments, overlapping beams and historical layers. Rather than neutralising the space, the intervention incorporates its anomalies into the overall pictorial composition. Structural inconsistencies cease to be technical problems and become part of the painterly vocabulary, stripping the white cube of its presumed neutrality.

Paintings and walls share the same tension: the everyday changes scale, objects resist time, and architecture becomes an integral part of the image.

Time transforms things. Painting continues to recognise them.