Galleria Vik Milano presents Le grand Jeu. The magic of everyday life, a solo exhibition by Aldo Damioli, on view from January 22 to February 15, 2026.

Aldo Damioli is known for his work on the urban landscape, developed through a conscious perceptual reversal. His city views stage an upside-down time, in which painting openly reveals itself as artifice and as a historical language applied to the present. By observing major contemporary metropolises through the grammar of eighteenth-century Vedutismo, Damioli rereads urban modernity by adopting a deliberately anachronistic style. From New York to Paris, from Beijing to Milan, the cities depicted by the artist are immediately recognizable in their architectural structures, but they gradually withdraw from any claim to realism. The use of a non-contemporary style produces an effect of estrangement that challenges our viewing habits, transforming the city view into a tool for reflecting on how we construct images of the present.

In this exhibition at Galleria Vik Milano, however, Damioli presents a group of works that marks a decisive departure from his most familiar production. The focus shifts from landscape to the human figure, which becomes the protagonist of a series of suspended and enigmatic scenes forming the core of the exhibition Le grand Jeu. The magic of everyday life. The figures painted by Damioli are captured in actions far removed from any productive or functional notion of doing. These are gestures that evoke a symbolic, playful, and sensory dimension: divination, play, attentiveness to the senses, contemplation, skill for its own sake, and the act of giving. Marginal, seemingly useless activities that appear to belong to an undefined time and that allude to a lateral, non-rational form of knowledge, removed from the logic of efficiency. Taken together, these works outline a gallery of figures suspended in another time, seemingly gazing with discreet nostalgia toward an irrational and playful aspect of reality.

“Acrobats, sorceresses, jugglers, fortune tellers, illusionists, perfume distillers, women perhaps waiting—like ancient princesses under a spell—for the gift of a distant and unknown admirer who might restore a lost and longed-for happiness,” writes curator Alessandro Riva. “These are the characters Aldo Damioli lays before us in this series of paintings that are at once lucid and enigmatic—figures who inhabit a lateral zone of reality, where gesture withdraws from function and action loses purpose, taking on a symbolic density connected to waiting, ritual, and a suspension of ordinary time. The very title of the exhibition, Le grand Jeu, refers to the journal of the same name founded between 1927 and 1928 by a group of French high school students, barely more than adolescents, including Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and René Daumal, for whom ‘play’ was not escapism but a cognitive testing ground capable of undermining established forms of thought and perception. It is along this same line that Damioli’s painting is positioned today: not as a narration of the world, but as an exposure of its most secret tensions, where art itself—with its metamorphic and mysterious power—stands among the great symbolic artifices capable of influencing, if not directly the fate of the world, then certainly consciousness, stimuli, perception, and the very boundaries of the imagination of those who love it, collect it, and live with it in their everyday lives.”

In a present marked by conflict, global fears, and constant acceleration, Damioli’s painting thus suggests the possibility of a different relationship with reality, founded on experience, waiting, and enigma. A “Grand Jeu,” indeed, in which everyday life is imbued with a subtle, silent magic - never spectacular, but profoundly necessary.