All my Calvaries were rosy crucifixions, pseudo-tragedies to keep the fires of hell burning brightly for the real sinners who are in danger of being forgotten.

(Henry Miller)

For this exhibition, The rosy crucifixion, I wanted to put together a number of works by established, mid-career and emerging young artists. Some have been working with Massimo Minini gallery for years, while for others this is the first time; in addition to these, we have some works from Massimo's private collection.

The subject of the exhibition is the human body as a set of organs held together by our skin, the epidermis of our ego, boundary and bridge with the world outside us and with that of others different from us: the body in its erotic dimension, an instrument of perception for growth and knowledge, a space for intimacy and encounters, mixture of pleasure and pain, desire and fear, vitality and death. For these artists, the artwork is a tool that explores a visionary mental Eros, a means of expansion that encompasses everything from autobiography and memoir to mystic research, inner psyche analysis and the history of art, to end up bordering on science fiction.

To navigate through such a complex and elusive subject, it was my wish to create a specific itinerary.

The first works focus on the alternating perception of our own body and of the body of someone other than us: the subjects of Roberto de Pinto's encaustic paintings are the artist's alter egos immersed in a warm, voluptuous Mediterranean atmosphere; Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs portray bodies through a vision that enhances their metallic and shiny perfection; Sophie Thun produces her work in the darkroom, playing around with fragmentation and repetition, analogue shots where she portrays herself creating unique, non-reproducible photographs.

As we progress through the exhibition everything starts to crumble, giving way to a more dreamlike, unstable dimension: an example of this is a master of photography like Duane Michals, with his cinematic and narrative approach to the medium, in which desire plays a key role; for Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden dreams are everything and the camera is a
time machine capable of taking us into the sexuality of classical myths; the classical world appears also in the photographic collages of George Woodman, where nudes mix with the surrounding environment or with ancient archaeological remains.

The last part of the exhibition brings together the starkest and most dramatic works: Ivana Bašić's organs become a basic sculptural element where the concepts of "interior" and "exterior" are completely blurred; Anna-Sophie Berger plays around with commonplace everyday objects, turning them into elements of activation and destabilization of our life and our corporeality; Pierre Klossowski's large drawings teach us about domination and coercion, about power relations that slip through our fingers; the large, fat bodies painted by Maria Giovanna Zanella become a formal subject to look into art itself, sexuality and perverse, polymorphic forms of sensuality.

The title is a tribute to Henry Miller and his trilogy of books Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus, published between 1949 and 1959, which are usually grouped under the title The rosy crucifixion.

Henry Miller has always been a central figure for me. I have always found his approach to the world to be the most profound and refreshing. And I have always loved the way his hunger for life was only surpassed by his hunger for art and beauty. No other writer can make us remember as well as he does the reasons why life will always be too short.

(Antonio Grulli)