Gabriele Cappelli: Twenty-Five Years of Color

In the golden hush of Cadogan Gallery, Gabriele Cappelli’s painting seems to breathe. The exhibition celebrates twenty-five years of a practice that has made color both a sensory and mental experience - a language capable of speaking without depicting. The new works, created specifically for Milan, are both a return to origins and a leap forward: abstract variations that revisit the key themes of his career, distilling them into new harmonies. Cappelli, born in Forlì and embraced by London since 1997, forged his artistic identity amid the energy of the Young British Artists. But while many pursued provocation and irony, he chose the quiet, radical path of pure painting. In his work, color does not describe - it exists. It is an autonomous substance, calibrated through unexpected juxtapositions that create tension or balance, like chords in an abstract score. Material is equally central. Waxes and powders recalling the brilliance of gold blend with oil glazes, forming surfaces that catch and diffuse light as if they were secular icons. Each canvas emerges as a field of forces: form governs, color vibrates, and the viewer’s gaze settles into an intense, meditative calm. Cappelli retraces foundational moments of his career and reinterprets them with mature clarity. This exhibition does not simply look back - it advances - an inquiry into the possibilities of painting today and its power to generate interior spaces in a world saturated with images. In Milan, his luminous abstraction becomes an invitation to a rarefied, intimate, and necessary perceptual experience.