Xian Kim | La follia che viene dall’incanto

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P420 is pleased to announce Respite for this Afternoon, the first solo exhibition in the gallery and in Europe by the South Korean artist Xian Kim (1992, Seoul).

Through her practice as a painter, Xian Kim reinterprets familiar creatures and objects, stripping them of all extraneous elements and investigating their deepest essence. Reconstructed on canvas with intriguing textures, using plastics or ceramics, the elements taken from everyday life are transformed into objective, spontaneous still lifes. Suspended in an idealized void – similar to a world with zero gravity – Kim’s subjects escape from the anxieties of the contemporary world to give rise to a peaceful, liberating visual utopia, where the emotional temperature gives way to silent contemplation.

The title of the show, Respite for this Afternoon, acts as a conceptual fulcrum for the entire project, and refers to that specific and suspended fraction of time typical of certain afternoons, especially in summer. It is that moment of transition when the light vibrates with dreamy intensity, and chronological time seems to loosen its grip on reality, rooted in the artist’s gaze. Crossing the threshold of this exhibition thus means entering an intimate, protected dimension.

The “powdered” surfaces of Xian Kim’s canvases stage a microcosm made of small sculptures, jars and knick-knacks. Freed from their merely practical function, these objects become little domestic altars and secular nativity scenes. Far from becoming a pure naturalistic exercise, the artist’s works become an interregnum: bending and gently distorting physiognomies and forms, she triggers a new visual grammar. Echoing the metaphysical solitude of the great tradition of painting – capable of extracting the absolute from the quotidian – the works on view present themselves as celebrations of living, layered material. Every patch of color is an exercise of presence, an invitation to slow our thoughts and to listen to the “sacred conversations” the objects establish with each other.

As Gioele Melandri emphasizes in the critical essay that accompanies the show: “In a world that seems to be shrinking, collapsing into itself and becoming increasingly frenetic and governed by performance, Xian Kim’s painting acts as a form of silent resistance, and this exhibition, as if it were a pause, urges us to suspend any form of preset judgment. [...] For Xian painting things, in the final analysis, means looking after them, raising them out of the dust of banality to reveal their most sophisticated intimacy. Respite for this Afternoon thus becomes a formal invitation to grant ourselves the luxury of a pause; to seek our own opening, our own trajectory, to get beyond what is obvious and to discover – in the partiality of a detail – that remnant of goodness that still exists, useful to avoid getting completely lost in the chaos of this world – or to get lost only as much as is necessary.”
Exhibitions

From 9 to 13 June 2026 Opentour returns, the event organized by the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna in collaboration with Associazione Ascom of the Galleries of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bologna and Fondazione Zucchelli. Now at its 12th iteration, Opentour confirms its role as a platform for the promotion of young contemporary art talents, transforming the city into a distributed laboratory of artistic research, discussion and experimentation.

The focal point of Opentour is the program Giovani talenti in galleria, curated by Carmen Lorenzetti and Giuseppe Lufrano, which simultaneously involves 31 galleries and private spaces in the city. This pathway of exhibitions represents the fulcrum of the event, creating a direct dialogue between higher education and the contemporary art system. Since its inception, in fact, Opentour has fostered a relationship between the Academy and the cultural fabric of the city, relying on galleries as strategic resources to support and accompany new generations along their career paths.

For Opentour 2026, P420 is pleased to present La follia che viene dall’incanto (The Folly that Comes from Enchantment), a group show that brings together the visions of ten emerging artists: Asia Galeati, Federico Grilli, Yichen Li, Yunru Quan, Paolo Saputo, Enrico Scapinelli, Luisa Maija Severino, Giuseppe Urciuolo, Changchang Xu and Morigen Yan.

Curated by Prof. Luca Caccioni, the exhibition takes the form of an act of poetic resistance against the “muscular hypertrophy” of contemporary art, often reduced to pure photogenic spectacle for speedy consumption. The show encourages viewers to rediscover painting and the work of art not as a mute surface, but as a magnetic “skin” that encases an invisible, esoteric content.

Through the works of these ten artists, the exhibition investigates the subjective digging into that “inner capital” whose roots extend down into the gaze of childhood. It is this primordial enchantment that triggers a “sweet and visionary folly” capable of transforming the inanimate object into an entity endowed with a soul, shifting the encounter with art from mere consumption to profound anthropological experience.

From the curator’s notes: “I still like to think that inanimate objects have a soul; a soul that attaches itself to ours and obliges it to love. I like to think that painting is a skin, a surface that covers something invisible, esoteric and magnetic, something that makes us look. I believe it is impossible to teach contemporary art without the aid of anthropology, and without subjective digging into that inner capital: perhaps the only capital still worthy of our investment. Though it is composed of countless sediments, its genesis lies in the gaze of childhood. A gaze that is not simply amazement, but enchantment. It is precisely here that a sweet, visionary folly comes to the fore: the folly that permits us to practice art in all senses and in all directions, and to encounter art not as consumption, but as experience.”

Luca Caccioni