This is the story of a reunion of two artists, curators and writers in an unconventional and timeless space that is still opened to the unexpected. It is the story of two restless nomads that travel around the world absorbing shapes and thoughts, feeding the two disciplines they practice, the artistic and the curatorial. Years ago, Paolo Colombo (Piamonte 1949) managed his time and gathered energies because he wanted to be a guru of postmodernity.

With hybrid new formulas he became one of the most plural and internationally respected art advisors. Previous to his Trip to Ithaca he had painted and exhibited in various art galleries. He was able to see art through the other side of the looking glass, and he really felt comfortable on that position. Colombo returns to Italy, his homeland after a long stay in the United States and Switzerland where he worked on chronological order on the MCA Chicago, the Tyler School of Art of Philadelphia and later becomes director of the Centre d'Art Contemporain of Geneva. He returns to create and build the program at the Maxxi in Rome. In 2007 he presents in the museum a collective exhibition where he selects and meets personally his young namesake, Paolo Chiasera.

Chiasera (1978, Emilia-Romagna) decides to live in Berlin after studying at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Bologna located at the European cultural epicenter. He makes paintings and sculptures experimenting with different media and creates his own identity as an artist. He is interested on the reflections of an exhibition when they are repeated in his memory again and again; when he retains and revives a well-told plastic universe. Later meditations result in Secondo Stile, whose concept is based on the second style of Roman Classicism. A multidisciplinary project where painting becomes an itinerant space and invites other artists and curators around the world to experiment in this mutant, divergent and almost sonorous place. Secondo Stile contains the patina and the whispers of all the cities, more than a score, that Paolo has temporarily inhabited...

Chiasera and Colombo are, in short, thinkers who understand the classical meaning of the term humanist in its totality, and transcribe it to their Modus Vivendi. Both artists meet at Espacio Valverde to narrate a story of their own. An intergenerational dialogue is established, with different styles and formats that have as common characteristic the converging circumstance of a similar way of life.

They now face plastic and intellectual fairness; they look back and recognize each other. In addition, they feel comfortable cohabiting this timeless space. The paintings of Chiasera have the aesthetic strength of the giant, and the technical complexity of the alchemist who mixes with different materials to achieve magical effects on the canvas. The subtle watercolors of Colombo are, however, the summary of a refined life, of a correct reading, of a deep knowledge of Greek Latin cultures reinterpreted from the contemporary paradigm. Colombo lives for years in Athens because when you have lived everywhere you have to return to the sources, the most archaic of our being to know where to find the muses, as he says in his poemario verbalized in the work of art, Let The Mermaids Flirt With Me again and again…