Sir Taki employs images as instruments of visual anthropology, constructing narratives that probe the complexity of human experience through associations and contrasts. Each work emerges from a process of juxtaposing and recomposing images — photographs, comics, paintings and archival materials — which the artist reworks digitally before translating them into various media: public installations, videos or prints. His practice explores the threshold between looking and seeing, confronting the viewer with cut, fragmented or dissonant visual combinations that invite reflection on the meanings generated by their relationships.
The works presented in the exhibition reflect this exploratory and relational approach. Some belong to ongoing projects in which the artist reinterprets the same subject through different techniques and exhibition contexts. Roberto, for instance, originated as a digital collage before becoming a mural painted in 2023 in Chiasso, while I Liberi?, a large site-specific paper installation created in the same city, is shown here in a reduced version, in dialogue with the gallery space. Through digital collage and the layering of visual languages, Sir Taki develops a method of synthesis and rewriting — a process in which heterogeneous fragments encounter one another to generate new meanings and new modes of perception.

Mattia Ragni’s Drift series explores the fragmented condition of the present through a visual language built on stratification and collision. His collages and laser-cut engravings on steel emerge from a process of collecting and reassembling visual fragments — drawings, stickers, consumer materials and residues of contemporary iconographic noise — which the artist transforms into intricate structures suspended between order and chaos. The resulting works constitute a visual archive where personal memories intersect with collective imagery. These steel constructions evoke modem-like devices, their drawn paper surfaces functioning as screens that contain dense, sci-fi microcosms. Within these rigid, almost scientific frameworks, speculative images unfold, generating tension between structure and imagination. Drift thus becomes an inquiry into the crisis of vision and the precarious status of the image within global capitalism — a meditation on an era where beauty and monstrosity persist in unstable equilibrium.

Across their distinct visual languages, Jung Min Lee, Leilei Wu, Mattia Ragni and Sir Taki engage critically with the circulation of images that define our contemporary visual horizon. Each artist reconfigures fragments drawn from popular culture, digital media and the visual archetypes of science fiction, transforming them into new symbolic constellations. In Myths from Smoldering Skies, their practices converge to reflect on the production and survival of images in an era of saturation and collapse. By appropriating, recomposing and transforming residues from contemporary visual culture, the artists activate new mythological narratives — hybrid, ambivalent and regenerative — that inhabit the liminal space between documentation and fiction, past and future. Within this shared terrain, image-making becomes an act of survival and reinvention: a way of reclaiming meaning from the smoldering debris of the present.

— Anni Wu