Running until April 24, 2025, Vodka Cola is the new exhibition by Matteo Gatti at GALLERIA GIAMPAOLO ABBONDIO. The artist explores ideological fractures and socio-economic transformations in our present, examining the fluid boundaries between work, consumption, and private life through installations and the writings of Alessio Barettini
Words Domenico Costantini
The exhibition immerses us in a world of industrial decline, yet, in an almost subterranean tension, it plays with its own obsolescence. It’s as though Gatti is inviting a “future memory” formed from remnants and absences. The artist does not narrate a story, but allows it to resonate. Time, like an open wound, presents itself as an incomplete cycle—never fully explained, always in flux.
His work is not just an aesthetic gesture; it’s an attempt to dust off the bones of a world that never truly dared to die. The critique becomes fluid, like a current moving through cracks in a past that resists capture, where productivity gives way to an “heroic improductivity”—a rejection of the relentless race toward achievement and an act of resistance against the ceaseless drive to “do.” Gatti poses the question: what happens when non-action becomes an act of creation, when the absence of form carries meaning, balanced precariously between anarchy and structure?
His pieces, born of fractured historical and political memories, are more than reflections on the past; they are distorted mirrors that expose the contradictions of our increasingly liquid present. In this interplay of visibility and invisibility, Gatti rejects a system that has bound humanity to a logic of endless consumption and exploitation. His installations—photographs, found objects, and site-specific interventions—don’t just comment on the world; they seek to change how we perceive it, urging the viewer into an uneasy awareness of the fractures in our reality.
Like the Area track Vodka Cola, a fusion of contradictions between East and West, capitalism and Soviet ideology, the work emerges in its rawest form: that of homogenization and control. The past returns, not as mere nostalgia, but as a warning to rediscover the strength of rebellion. A rebellion that doesn’t conform, that doesn’t bend, but transforms invisibly within its own latent power. If the historical compromise between Italy’s Christian Democrats and Communists sought shared power, today we see the scars of that effort in the porous boundaries between public and private life, between politics and economics. There’s little need to explain further: the work, like an underground whisper, suggests that the demand for change never fully disappeared—it only transformed, resurfacing in the quiet corners of our everyday lives.
With his raw yet poetic language, Matteo Gatti invites us to linger in the space between an industrial past that still pulses and the unstoppable rise of liquid capitalism, which dissolves all forms but leaves memory intact. Resistance, as art, becomes action. And in non-productivity, something new can finally emerge.
