The exhibition explores how, over the last forty years, a significant section of Italian art has chosen to work, seemingly, ‘against the grain of its own era’, establishing an irregular, intermittent or deliberately anachronistic relationship with history.

Following the conceptual period, between the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Transavantgarde brought painting and figuration back to the fore. Artists such as Chia, Cucchi, Clemente and Paladino reintroduced narrative, myth and the archaic: not as nostalgia, but as a reactivation of an iconographic repertoire embedded in Italian cultural memory. This shift was followed by the work of the Anacronisti, who engaged with the past through an even more decisive approach: a return to form, to classical composition and to a style of painting that seems to belong to another era.

Since then, many artists have developed forms of misaligned temporality. In the digital age and the hyper-present, this suspension has become a widespread condition: works that belong neither fully to yesterday nor to today occupy an intermediate territory, in which iconographic memory is continually reassembled, interrupted or slowed down.