The outsider – the introspective creature who lives on the fringes of the voracious march that seals relationships in big cities – walks stealthily in the wake of subtleties. He calmly savors all the leisure that time has given him, turning him into a rich connoisseur of undercurrents. He communicates through them. If the terminology is applied to him as a way of defining any “rusticity of spirit,” it is solely due to our subtle inability to perceive the other. How rudimentary we are.

Through his new series of paintings “On the contrary,” Fabio Baroli portrays one of these bumpkins, tracing and punctuating his implicit meanings. In this compilation, the shrewdness of wordplay that shapes this imaginary narrative not only rescues a culture that, in most cases, eludes our understanding but, above all, points to the delicacy of the ties in his personal universe. The deceit represented in Baroli’s paintings is realistically subtle, and for that reason, we must look at it lightly, in all its details, not to miss one, two, or a hundred worlds that are complete and indecipherable but, nevertheless, perfectly possible. A delightful contradiction that immediately resonates with the thematic mood of the exhibition.