In Stockholm Stefano Serretta covers the stained-glass windows of a Gio Ponti’s building with newspapers

Shoegaze is the term that Vasco Forconi borrows to call the cycle of exibitions he curated at the Italian Institute of Culture in Stocholm, literally fixed look on shoes, a term used to indicate the musical subculture born in Britain in the late '80s that was able to resist the regime of spectacle and entertainment dictated by the music industry of the time. A young generation of artists active in Italy and Sweden is called upon to talk about the social and political crisis of our time within a precious architectural object, the spokesman of Gio Ponti's great idea of modernity.

This is how “Relapse”, by Stefano Serretta was born, a newspaper suspended between fiction and verisimilitude, whose pages populated by characters and fragments of text, cover the large windows of the Institute. The impossibility of the visitor's gaze to peer into the building and the full emptying of the premises - a gesture that in contemporary imagery alludes to the failure of a commercial activity - is only temporary. Inside the building the stained-glass windows covered with polychrome sheets and crossed by sunlight become huge lightboxes, large paintings hanging in the rooms of the Institute, through which the artist unfolds a narrative made of images.

In his work Stefano Serretta turns his attention to the languages, symbols and fetishes of those political and religious ideologies that survive in a present which is considered post-ideological.
The artist plunges into the world of online communication platforms used by heterogeneous communities of young people grouped under the label alt-right, or alternative-right, analyzing the unbridled production and dissemination of images, mythologies, symbols, political impropriety, social anxiety, anti-feminism, open racism and speeches conveying evil humor and then chew them and return them in his drawings. Stefano Serretta invites the audience to observe the mixture of ambiguity, violence and malaise of which these characters are spokeperson and question them in search of hidden messages and, why not, a spark of political hope.