Polisemie del visibile

On the occasion of Milan Art Week, LCA Studio Legale presents a site-specific intervention by Giulia Mangoni at Palazzo Borromeo.

In dialogue with the Giochi Borromeo cycle, created in the mid-fifteenth century, Mangoni develops a series of drawings that engage with the courtly iconographic repertoire, featuring animal figures, bodies in motion, and botanical motifs, treating it as an open field of variation. The images are not quoted, but reactivated through processes of superimposition, displacement, and proliferation.

This operation is rooted in a visual tradition characteristic of the late Lombard Gothic context, in which manuscript illumination and votive representations translated the observation of reality, particularly in botanical detail, into a system of signs. Similarly, Mangoni reactivates this tension between observation and construction, allowing the figure to emerge as a process rather than a fixed form.

Situated in the adjacent room, Polisemie del visibile takes shape as a dispositive in which the image unfolds into a plurality of states and appearances. In this space, the visible manifests as polysemy: not as a multiplication of meanings, but as an unstable condition of the image itself.

“The project Polysemies of the Visible originates from my desire to engage with a historical imaginary not as something fixed, but as a living, traversable matter. In this sense, the Borromeo Games become for me an active archive, from which images connected to the cycle of frescoes are set back into circulation through drawing, opening up to a plurality of interpretations.

In working with these materials, I am interested in courtly Gothic and its ‘lenticular realism’: a way of constructing the image that does not seek spatial coherence, but instead privileges surface, detail, and decoration. Figures flatten, become charged with attributes, and take on a precious quality. Chivalric, religious, and fairy-tale themes coexist in a suspended space, where visual richness replaces depth and multiplies possible levels of meaning.

This tension toward luxury and preciousness – also through elements such as the punchwork of backgrounds, typical of the period – is not, for me, a quotation, but an operative principle. Through stratifications and variations, starting from an archive of drawings that I build over time, the image opens up to an unstable dimension, where the history of courtly Gothic enters into dialogue with oil paintings that share the same attention to decorative flatness, activating continuous shifts in meaning.

The work thus moves between archetype and the individual, without settling into a definitive form. The image becomes an open field, in constant transformation, in which the visible unfolds into plural forms and the gaze is continually called upon to redefine itself.”

Giulia Mangoni