Opacity as a Healing Space at Limbo Contemporary in Milan presents itself as an encounter of two distinctive yet complementary practices, those of Szilvia Bolla and Lorenzo Conforti, merging into a meditative dialogue on ambiguity, vulnerability, and psychological resilience.
In an era saturated with clear-cut visuals and rapid signification, the exhibition gently insists on opacity, suggesting that healing may exist precisely in the refusal of immediate clarity and resolution.
Lorenzo Conforti’s paintings, deeply psychological in origin, resist the usual narrative impulse and instead revel in their deliberate ambiguity. The hybridized, abstract forms he produces reflect the complexities of the human mind, evoking mental fog, sensory overload, and snow syndrome—conditions intimately familiar to the artist himself. Rather than settling comfortably into interpretative clarity, Conforti’s artworks insist on remaining unresolved, suspended between form and void. His site-specific wall interventions quietly unfold across gallery walls, extending this metaphorical space of psychological transit, inviting viewers into an internal landscape that remains intentionally unsettled.
In contrast, Szilvia Bolla navigates the delicate intersection of personal narrative, bodily vulnerability, and systemic medicalization. Her resin sculptures poetically materialize emotional trauma and pharmacological interventions, translating personal and collective experiences of vulnerability into tactile forms. Bolla’s work vividly chronicles the trajectory of psychoactive substances through the body, inspired by her grandmother's traumatic experience. Here, sculptures elegantly blend botanical motifs with prosthetic aesthetics, exploring how external forces profoundly reshape human bodies and psyches.
Despite their divergent mediums, Bolla and Conforti converge on themes of absence, transformation, and emotional fragility. They reclaim decorative aesthetics and elusive visual languages as methods of subtle resistance, positioning opacity itself as an essential condition for meaningful reflection. The exhibition, therefore, emerges as a gentle but powerful counter-narrative to contemporary visual culture’s obsession with instant comprehension. It provides a contemplative pause—a place for unresolved complexities and quiet resistance, offering profound insights into how opacity itself can serve as a site of profound healing.
