Ten years after his last solo exhibition, Luca Quartana finally returns — with a farewell show.
Why fill time, only to leave again?

First, I want to clear up a possible misunderstanding: Luca is here with me, and he’s doing well.
His pained, even dramatic portrayal in two recent photographs by Johnny Ricci and Annalisa Guidetti — which show him during a piece carried out on him by Antonella Ortelli — is simply a presentation of self, not a reflection of any condition disconnected from his physical or mental identity.
To be clear, it expresses a state of mind, not a temporary condition of the body.

We’re sitting together in the new studio he built in his new home, continuing to work. Because Quartana — as he has always done since the early 1980s — has kept working intensely: primarily on the visual writing of his website, lucaquartana.it, and on the themes of relationship and reciprocity through art, within the Progetto Casina by Antonella Ortelli, held in the women’s section of San Vittore prison.

To create this first image, Quartana offered his own body as a surface for Ortelli’s drawing — an emotionally demanding yet surprisingly natural continuation of the work of exchange and interrelation developed with the women of Progetto Casina.
Through the simple act of drawing bold pencil lines, Luca becomes — in a truly Manzonian sense — a “living” drawing by Ortelli, documented and preserved, until his next shower, by the unflinching lenses of Ricci and Guidetti.

Yet the true meaning of the work lies elsewhere: in submitting himself to this minimal graphic act, Luca’s male body — transformed over time, shaped by life and experience — is redefined through Antonella’s sensitivity as both a surface and a plastic form through which a tactile and gestural relationship can emerge.
Each person’s role is clear, but none are conventional. The familiarity of their parallel paths — artistic and personal — both of which began during their formative years at Casa degli Artisti and Luciano Fabro’s school in Brera, allows for an encounter on equal footing, an unprecedented intimacy, and a mutual recognition between the one who draws and the one who is drawn.

The mark does not assert itself as geometry or an autonomous script upon the body; rather, it seeks within the figure and transforms it. It brings to the surface — almost translucently, through the pores of the skin — the internal lines and writing of the person, felt empathetically in their sense of inadequacy in the face of reality.
Every drawn line, every spoken word, is ultimately an attempt to read ourselves in others.

This Farewell is, paradoxically, a way for Luca to reach out to us — to call us to gather around him and witness, together, some of what he has seen over the past ten years.
Alongside the photographs, large cloths reproduce, at environmental scale, an anthology of the verbo-visual pages from his website.
But this translation into exhibition form is not merely a matter of scale — not just a geometric projection of a digital work, which in itself has no physical dimensions, only internal proportions — it is a matter of breath (sss…) and of light.

Certainly, the encounter with the buildings of Assab One — when Luca was invited by Eugenio Alberti Schatz to conceive a contribution for a potential group show, which remains, for now, in the planning stage — proved decisive. It was while moving through those spaces that the rhythm of these new large-format digital prints was born, hanging like stage backdrops in a backstage area.

But Quartana wasn’t searching for a stage on which to place his work — or at least, such a stage could not, paradoxically, coincide with the concrete lines of any given architecture.
After the sculptural casting of the exhibition space (Ut Pictura Poesis, Milan, Galleria Belvedere, 1989), the vital seclusion of Treazione (Milan, Galleria Bordone, 1993), and the habitat — in the specific sense given by Luciano Fabro — of Chi, at the 1993 Venice Biennale, the sculptor had already moved past the Palladian concerns of order and proportion that had animated some of his earlier contributions to group exhibitions like Filologiae (with Casa degli Artisti, Milan, Santa Maria delle Grazie, 1983), Geometrie Dionisiache (Milan, Rotonda della Besana, 1988), and also, through interventions in the urban fabric and stage design, in his installations for Politica (Novi Ligure, 1988), which he organized together with Mario Pardi, and in his collaborations with Pardi and the collective Bandamagnætica in the late 1980s.

Already with Insignificazione (Ancona, Campo degli Ebrei, part of the Polverigi festival, 1995), his practice no longer needed to take shape as a fixed form or structure.
Quartana’s action entered into relation with the anthropic environment that hosted it, limiting itself to freeing it from the brambles that had overrun it — a gesture of recognition for its symbolic function in the collective memory of the local community.

Something similar happens at Assab One: the quality of the space lies precisely in its refusal to erase, through a restyling, the anthropological traces of the graphic-editorial work culture that shaped the recent history of Milan in the 1960s and 70s — just as much as the major artistic movements of that era.

It is, in Quartana’s words, “a place filled with stories, both self-respecting and welcoming at the same time” — one that does not constrain him and cannot, in turn, be constrained by him.
Like on the pages of a book, the writings flow effortlessly — often across verso and recto — along the banners suspended between the pillars or mounted on the walls.

Since 1996, with his participation in the Parasites exhibition in Brussels, Quartana has adopted writing as his primary expressive language — recognizing in it a fundamental poetic and philosophical value, capable of reconnecting the various roots of his practice: verbo-visual research, the spatialist legacy of Fontana, and conceptual art.
The space into which he inserts his work thus becomes the space of relationship — between word and person.

As Anna Fontanetto once observed, his word — gathered in books (Solo sesso, 2005; Scripta volant verba manent, 2005), written in black notebooks, on sheets and blackboards (Visual Rave, Milan, Società Umanitaria, 1997–1998), or projected in light (Dia 1 and Dia 2, Rovereto, Numero Civico, 1994), or made of neon (SSS, Rovereto, Galleria Aurora, 2003; Solo Sesso, Galleria Milano, 2005) — has become the central element of his investigations into space and relational dynamics, the very foundation of his poetics.

Yet already in 1990, his solo exhibition Il pittore veglia con te at Galleria Belvedere had been accompanied by a complex book project, Le peintre et sa femme.
There, as in the exhibition, his relationship with the artistic tradition of the 20th century unfolded in layered forms, grounded in the substrate of individual existence — a circle that ran from his own childhood to family life and the birth of his children.

The large photograph portraying him, positioned at the center of the first room, is accompanied by a series of visual writings in which an initial “S” unfolds into a sequence of words through which Quartana seeks — and states — the coordinates of his SELF, in both immediacy and endurance.
Next, he chooses another icon — the monumental image of a sculpture — beside which the parabola of the FOOL serves as an introduction to the following room, entirely filled with writing. There, he aligns six permutational panels that simulate (through a deliberate break) the sequence of logical relationships between PERSON, WORD, SPACE, and TIME.

Some of the key moments along this path are marked by the luminous presence of neon letter compositions — a now obsolete technology, which Quartana revisits with renewed interest and almost tenderness, returning it to the artistic tradition that had embraced it in the 1950s and 60s.

The claustrophobia evoked by the near-carceral enclosure of a narrow space, with no openings to the outside, is broken by the presence of six YOUs which, like the I elsewhere in the show, take on the form of stylized silhouettes — faces or masks.

But light, it should be noted, is not only the structural element of these electric and electronic works by Quartana.
What else, after all, are the large photographs? Even the writings, composed and printed using digital technologies, still carry within them the seed of light: the warm hues of the backgrounds and the subtle greys of the letters are sampled — pixel by pixel — from the backdrops of five photographic images taken for him by Ricci and Guidetti.
These seemingly neutral backgrounds are, in reality, rich in color. Those tones are, in fact, the sampled light chosen by the photographers to illuminate both man and sculpture.

The exhibition path comes to an end. But in the glass booth at the top of the staggered staircase, Quartana has recreated a sort of den — reminiscent of his Treazione space. From this control room, he can present himself to the public in the form most natural to him: performance (Action 1 and Action 2), broadcast in audio and video throughout the exhibition space, with sound design and direction by two of his children, Irene and Tommaso.

Inside this transparent enclosure, he performs — in public — a gesture he hasn’t made in a very long time, accompanied by an immaterial work by Ortelli (M. Rosa, 1989) and the notes of a song by Franco Boggero. There, he reads the long text he had begun writing for Mario Pardi shortly before his death — a text he has been continuously rewriting for the past twenty years.

That’s where Luca awaits us.
That’s where we can see him.

And paradoxically, despite all the friends surrounding him, despite the presence of all those who came to see him, despite all the lights we have turned on, I see that Luca is alone —
“I want to see you alone,” Antonella Ortelli wrote in the text introducing Luca’s second website, lucaquartana.net —
alone, where nothing is illuminated.

It’s February, and it will surely be cold…
And darkness will fall early.

Farewell is betrayal.
It is the lid of the sarcophagus of time, lowered over the bodies of the living.
It is death-in-life, the most powerful trailer for the end that we are capable of imagining.
Perhaps not coincidentally, at the origin of European melodrama lies a farewell with no possibility of appeal: Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell (London, 1689).
The story is told in Book IV of the Aeneid — a perfectly symmetrical canto in which the world of men prepares to flee to port, loading supplies onto ships, while the world of women grieves in the palace (the wood of the ships, the wood of the funeral pyres).

Purcell ends the opera with a lament — a form dear also to Monteverdi and Cavalli — in which a descending ostinato bass theme of three or four notes repeats itself, over and over.
The curtain falls on the sacrifice of a foreign princess on her native soil — an act made functional to the future founding of Rome.
One door is closed to open another.
You cannot keep two doors open at once.
It’s the same principle that led the Achaeans to burn their ships behind them in order to commit to the conquest of Troy.
As devastating and painful as it may be, there is often a higher design behind a farewell — one capable of rendering the original framework obsolete.

When I am laid in earth,
May my wrongs create
No trouble in thy breast.
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.

The queen does not wish to be erased; on the contrary, she wishes to be loved forever in memory.
She refuses to live by someone else’s conditions, or to compromise her soul.
And so she transforms the farewell into death — ensuring that she lives on forever in the Western canon.
(She would have died more completely had she remained alive after Aeneas’s betrayal, slowly fading away.)

Farewells have never been absent from literature and art.
Henry Roth, after writing Call It Sleep, became a firefighter.
Arthur Rimbaud stopped writing true poetry at the age of twenty.
J.D. Salinger, after four masterpieces, withdrew from the world for good.
Truman Capote, after In Cold Blood, slid into decline and never completed another work.
And above all, Marcel Duchamp replaced art with chess — though, in secret, he would spend twenty years working on Étant donnés.

True farewells? Biographical crises?
Strategies to draw more attention?

At the height of success, the artist exits the stage, slamming the door behind them.
Fan clubs are left orphaned and bewildered, but nothing external can bring the artist back.
It’s a recurring phenomenon, like financial crises in capitalism.
One might even think of it as a pressure valve — a way to release the guilty conscience of the art system, which is always expected to register progress and chart upward curves.

If we stick to the facts, it’s a reaffirmation of the individual’s reasons — and their power of veto within the consensus of the world.
The end does not justify the means, seem to tell us, in essence, those who take their leave in loud and unwavering fashion.

When we speak of farewells, we’re not only talking about suspensions.
There are also transformations, migrations, leaps into the void.
Take Vassily Kandinsky, for example: he broke away from the NKVM group in Munich when many members rejected his radical turn toward abstraction.
He sought to redeem art and restore it to a state of greater purity.

Luca Quartana began saying farewell to art a long time ago — during the very years when he was at the top of the pyramid.
In 1993, when he won the Marino Marini Prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale.
In 1996, when he took part in Manifesta 1 and conceived luoghicomuni.it, the forerunner of lucaquartana.it.
In 2005, with the exhibition Scripta volant verba manent at Carla Pellegrini’s Galleria Milano, when he limited himself to casting beams of light on frescoes, projecting a circle of light onto the floor, and writing with borotalco: Just dust.
That was his last show. Since then, his work has shifted to the web — a space dense with potential, yet rarefied in sensory terms.

lucaquartana.it is a Platonic cave where ideas are projected.
As reluctant as I may be to assign this space to the genre of visual poetry, I see no way around it.
There hovers, like a ghost from the past, the imprint of a legacy of making and imagining art physically — in space, for and with others.
A cloud of the finest dust, at the threshold of perception.

Quartana is not a hermit; he was searching for a space where he could continue his research without shutting out the world.
A place where, in his own words, “I want to be, and I want others to be too.”
A place that is not a studio, nor a gallery, nor a museum: it has no opening hours, no structural limits, no budget constraints.
It is a simple white sheet of thought.
An endless prairie.

Giorgio Zanchetti called it “the end of the line for navigation” — the place we reach to hear the truth of an inner oracle.
He has been working there for at least fifteen years, always creating new screens, new words, new graphic balances and intersections.
He intends to work there until the end of his days.
And when he dies, “a vocabulary will remain.”

Quartana was restless.
He was searching for a space of expression that was denser and freer than those he had known.
And since he couldn’t find one, he invented it.
He opened a small door and carved within it a place of origins — a miniature cathedral, itself filled with other small doors of meaning.

The exhibition Farewell can be read as a rope ladder that Quartana throws down to us from his metaphysical ark, inviting us aboard.
The website leaves us alone with our solitude, our disorientation, the smooth walls with no handholds, the frustration of not knowing where to go or why.
Those are our problems.
Or maybe, it’s simply not the right time.

It is an oracle that opens doors continuously, like an Escher staircase.
Each word is a sphere of caviar that bursts on the palate, releasing worlds, blossoms, stories.
Or a kamikaze paper lantern, sent drifting toward the enemy shore.
Each word generates new fields, reprogramming the layout of the words on the page.

If we click “nothing,” we encounter emptiness.
If we click “six,” a supernova explodes at the center, flinging words outward.
If we click “person,” a Macedonian phalanx of other people appears.
If we click quickly, we get a movie — words leaping like crickets in an anechoic chamber.

Top left corner: a tiny dot.
Bottom right corner: another tiny dot.
And at the center: nothing at all.
And nothing at all is something. A lot, in fact.
Much more than something.

The poem is titled Void, and it was written by Kandinsky.
In Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910), he also wrote about Maeterlinck’s theater:
“Words are inner resonance.”
And their “pure sound comes to the forefront and exerts direct pressure on the soul.”

Why does the artist invite us into his total white den?
To play with the alphabet of ultimate things — the concepts that define our identity as human beings.
There are no handholds.
The rules must be understood on our own.
Or better yet, we must make them ourselves, like the primitives who shaped spearheads from obsidian.
There are no alibis, no excuses, no shortcuts.

If we find emptiness within, we feel sorrow.
If we find emptiness outside, we feel fear.
The cave disturbs us — just enough.
And yet the site is not without a certain sharp, affectionate irony:
a small confessional in the reality show of life.

On the occasion of the exhibition at Assab One — a betrayal of the betrayal, a step back onto the stage — one feels grateful to Quartana.
And one begins to reflect on the role of the artist.

One of the most meaningful metaphors for the artist, in the contemporary field, is that of the Stalker — the guide in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film, who leads a writer and a physicist into the Zone, a mysterious area cordoned off by the military where the rules of common sense no longer apply.

The story of their small trek is the story of humanity: a shared and conflictual journey in which each expresses their distinctive existential signature, while seeking to shed light on the method behind the world.
The strangeness of the place is magnetic — and indeed, it attracts people despite being illegal, giving work to the Stalkers.

The artist is a guide who does not guarantee results, who does not replace the clients — just like a mountain guide, after all.
They simply accompany us into risky terrain — the kind from which it’s a joy to return to civilization changed within, enriched, illuminated.

The Stalker says:
“Weakness is power, and strength is nothing.
When a man is born, he is weak and supple;
when he dies, he is strong and rigid.
The same with a tree: while growing, it is tender and flexible;
once it becomes hard and dry, it dies.”

In an interview about the film, Andrei Tarkovsky was clear:
“The Zone is the Zone. The Zone is life.
As you pass through it, a person either breaks or endures.
Whether a person can endure depends on their sense of dignity,
and their ability to distinguish what is essential from what is transient.”

The film ends with the little girl moving a glass with the power of her mind —
a gesture that, sooner or later, will become ordinary.

Professor: “And is that room far?”
Stalker: “Two hundred meters in a straight line…
but here, unfortunately, there are no straight lines.”

P.S. Luca Quartana asked me to tell you this:
“Words are not private property. They belong to everyone.
I don’t want people to think about me.
Farewell.”