Monica De Cardenas is pleased to announce an exhibition by Slawomir Elsner, as part of the fifth edition of the Milano Drawing Week.

For this year’s edition Elsner engages in a visual and conceptual dialogue with Pietro Dorazio, selecting his work Reticoli from Collezione Ramo as point of encounter. Dorazio’s seminal exploration of color and structure becomes both a mirror and a counterpart for Elsner’s own investigations into perception, abstraction, and the act of seeing.

Slawomir Elsner (Wodzisław, Poland, 1976) lives and works in Berlin. He is celebrated for his refined and meticulous colored pencil drawings and watercolors that explore the interplay of light and chromatic depth. His works are built from dense, interwoven strokes – minute networks of color where no single line defines a contour. Each mark interacts with others, forming fields of light and hue rather than descriptive outlines. His distinctive hatching technique, working from light to dark, creates subtle, vibrant zones that blur the boundary between precision and softness.

In his watercolors, transparent washes accumulate gradually, revealing edges of color and traces left by drying pigment. Elsner’s graphically painted images remain at once transparent and opaque, obvious and enigmatic. They invite a gaze that merges surface and depth, proximity and distance; they evoke a contemplative experience that lies between intuition and perception.

In this exhibition Elsner establishes a visual and conceptual dialogue with Pietro Dorazio, a leading representative of post-war Italian abstract art, choosing his work Reticoli from Collezione Ramo as a meeting point. Dorazio's exploration of color and structure becomes both a mirror and a counterpart to Elsner's investigations into perception, abstraction, and the act of seeing.

Slawomir Elsner's artistic practice has long revolved around the transformation of historical imagery through drawing. In this new series, the artist revisits paintings by Palma Vecchio, Bernardino Luini and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, artists rooted in the Renaissance tradition of Milan and Lombardy. Rather than reproducing them, Elsner translates these works into distilled, meditative compositions, where gesture and chromatic vibration replace narrative and symbolism.

In Portrait of a Poet after Palma Vecchio, traditional elements – such as the laurel, the book, the rosary – dissolve, leaving what appears as a suspended, genderless figure that suggests serenity and introspection. Similarly, in his reinterpretation of Luini's Figure of a Saint, Half-Length, with a Palm and Reading the Scriptures, the gaze turns inward, transforming the iconography into a metaphor for contemplation. Through these re-imagined figures, Elsner searches for a timeless inner stillness, fully resonating with Dorazio's abstract spirituality.

By abstracting historical images, Elsner shifts the focus from the subject to perception, positioning himself within the great tradition of artistic self-reflection.

Winner of the Otto Ritschl Prize in 2020, Elsner has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich in 2024 and the Museum Wiesbaden in 2021. His works are included in prestigious collections such as the Rubell Family Collection (Miami), the Roche Collection (Basel), the Adrastus Collection (Mexico), and the Kunstmuseum Bonn.