A tired and wasted place, decaying and abandoned: this is the symbolic and metaphorical vision of the present seen by artist Gianmaria Tosatti in his new installation in Milan, two years after his solo exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca.

“Paradise” is the title of the site-specific work conceived for the former Magazzini Raccordati of Milan's Central Station, and produced by Eco Contract + Eco Design and Brembo, under the patronage of the City of Milan, open to the public from March 22 to April 11, 2025.

This monumental work comes with Tosatti's first solo exhibition at Lia Rumma Gallery in Milan titled “Es Brent!”, which can be visited from March 21 to May 8, 2025, featuring both paintings and installations made by the Roman artist in the last two years.

The space covering about three thousand square meters of the former Magazzini Raccordati, once used for the storage and distribution of goods that arrived by train in the city, appears bare and worn out by time, humidity and neglect: the visitor is invited to walk under the seven “heavenly vaults” in an atmosphere permeated by a disused sacredness, accompanied only by the sound of water dripping from the infiltrations of the ceilings, and the crunching of one's footsteps on the salt-covered floor, echoing in the space. These seven regal halls where the angelic hierarchies would reside are emptied, inhabited only by the presence of clochards wrapped in thermal blankets, an image unfortunately not far from the one that occurs to the eyes of those who cross the tunnels near the station every day.

The artist's choice to make the installation accessible only to five people at a time makes for a more intimate and contemplative experience, of walking through a place that has become a witness to violent devastation, like a catabasis that culminates in the last dark room. Here, a large, barely illuminated doorway gives access to an underground track, an evocation of an image indelible in the collective memory, and linked precisely to the history of that track from which the train that led to the extermination camps departed - in the space adjoining the one that now houses the Shoah Memorial in Milan. The darkness is filled only by the prayer song “El Mole Rahamim” recorded by actor Moni Ovadia, which in Jewish tradition is dedicated to the memory of people who died violent deaths, and is often used in Holocaust memorial celebrations.

Some recurring elements of Tosatti's poetic and visual language can be traced in this installation, starting with the choice of the abandoned space, passing through the chandeliers in the first room, the piles of salt reminiscent of the snow and sand of his other works, but also the large golden Latin inscriptions on the walls, recalling the most monumental intervention of the “Seven Seasons of the Spirit” cycle, entitled “Lucifer_3,” created in the former Magazzini Generali of the Port of Naples in 2015.

As stated in the exhibition text, “Paradise is a cruel and disenchanted vision of a world that no longer believes in itself, that by killing ideologies, even religious ones, has suffocated the sacredness of existence, and inhabits a dark, desolate land on which the sky has fallen to pieces.”