Finestra aperta: Nils Nova
Opening 11.10. | 4.30 - 8 pm
Opening hours: by appointment
KALI Gallery x Spazio Sassetti
Via dei Sassetti, 1
50123 Florence
Italy
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is – infinite.
— William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790–93
Nils Nova (1968, Santa Ana, El Salvador) is a Swiss–Salvadoran artist who lives and works in
Lucerne. Through his artistic practice, he often invites us to cross an invisible threshold: an open window onto a tangible world where perception and reality intertwine, blur, and continuously redefine each other.
With a curious and analytical gaze, his research — deeply marked by both personal and collective dimensions — translates into a lucid and profound sensory investigation of lived space and time, of intensely felt experience, and of the fascinating visual deception.
The élan vital that animates Nova’s work unfolds in painting with almost expressionistic traits, imbued with a visionary tension that guides it toward a kind of psychedelic rebirth. The artist reinvents traditional visual language, pushing it beyond the limits of the pictorial surface and occasionally intertwining it with alternative media such as photography and installation.
His practice is grounded in a layering of light beams, blurred images, superimpositions, and reflections that challenge the viewer’s conventional perception. The work thus becomes a fluid territory, an oscillating balance between reality and altered vision, between concrete and imagined space, where another dimension gradually becomes physically perceptible, and real space transforms through its own representation.
As the eclectic Leon Battista Alberti wrote, “painting holds within itself a divine power.”
Nova’s creative process is also based on the deconstruction of the very environment in which his work takes shape and is ultimately displayed. Through skillful use of pictorial material, fields of color — fluidly spread or capillary-branched, oscillating between acidic and incandescent tones or softer, muted hues — capture, in infinite variations, fragments of the surrounding space.
These elements, reworked, layered, and transformed, give rise to a play of sinuous, at times amorphous forms and colors that simultaneously represent and disarticulate visual reality. The surfaces thus come alive in chromatic stratifications capable of challenging every perceptual certainty. In this metamorphic process lies the very essence of the exhibition and of that “open window”, which is not only an invitation to look beyond, but also a metaphor for an experience that embraces the continuous becoming of perceived space. This transformation recalls the phenomenology of perception of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which emphasizes the central role of the body in shaping our experience of the world.
According to Merleau-Ponty, reality is not a fixed given but is constructed through sensitive, bodily interaction with surrounding space. By deconstructing and reassembling space, Nova destabilizes visual certainties and invites the viewer to inhabit a space in constant flux, where perception, body, and reality intertwine in a dynamic, unpredictably shifting, and deeply mutable dialogue.
Thus, Nils Nova does not merely evoke a sense of visual disorientation: he consciously highlights the mediation of the image, revealing traces of its constructive process and the inherently artificial nature of representation. His art does not seek illusory authenticity but embraces the complexity and stratification of contemporary perception, weaving with critical grace and refined lightness the interplay between reality, mediation, and fiction.
The result is a fully immersive and participatory experience, in which the viewer becomes an integral part of the work itself—called to walk, observe, and discover, step by step, new
glimpses, image fragments, and further spaces. A continuous dialogue between form and
content, between technique and perception, reflecting the philosophy of an exhibition
conceived as a liminal space, where vision transforms into experience, and the window—far from being a boundary—opens as a passage toward interpretive and expressive freedom.
Ultimately, by transcending the dichotomy between abstraction and figuration, Nils Nova’s solo exhibition Finestra aperta is not simply a display of visual works, but an invitation to reflect on how we inhabit and understand the space around us—on the forms it assumes in our consciousness, and on how reality can simultaneously be revealed and concealed in a subtle play of suggested images, sinuous lines, fragments of bodies, fleeting traces, and illusions.
A chorus of pictorial compositions emerges as a multifaceted, boundless, and heterogeneous resonance—capable of expanding our perception while also posing profound questions about the nature and significance of pausing in order to truly see, beyond the highest branches that, due to a certain chill, often interrupt the brilliance of foresight.
Here, the absence of embellishment and rigid representation, the emphasis on form and color, the branching fluidity of contours, and the expression of that which is—whether real or only apparently—intangible: all contribute to exploring as yet uncharted territories, moving with harmonious rhythm through contrasting visions and extreme perceptual states.
A new window thus opens onto concepts, expressive forms, and unprecedented visions,
celebrating the fearless power of imagination and the invaluable worth of free individuality.
Text by Domenico de Chirico
