What does it mean to resist? What significance does this word hold for an individual who, projected outside their home, must face the difficulties of contemporary society? And how can they do it?

To reflect on the concept of resistance today, it is necessary to start from the dimension of the self, from the internal tension from which the approach to the world inevitably originates.

For this reason, the exhibition Ventinovegiorni (of resistance) opens with an intimate work, Acqua azzurra acqua chiara by Elvio Chiricozzi.

The work presents the image of a boy lying on a bench, face up, with one finger pointing upward, beyond the limit of the canvas. The choice of this work represents an explicit will to look ahead, aware of the fragility of the subject, lacking the experience that makes the path stronger and safer. Chiricozzi’s protagonist is in a transitional age, no longer a child, not yet a teenager. Preadolescents, by their nature, live balanced between the routines they need and the aspiration for adventure. The artist’s child assumes a metaphorical significance, reminiscent of Truffaut’s children: full of vitality but marked by known anger, eager to break imposed rules and assert personality, yet too young to face life’s events with certainty. Their condition is suspended between reality and metaphorical reality.

Similarly, Chiricozzi’s work, while conveying a sense of pacification in its aesthetic form, embodies this interplay of emotions, expressing a strong relevance to the present (the work is from 2003). The piece immediately conveys an aspiration toward something else, a forward-looking vision grounded in its adherence to the earth (the bench) and therefore the present, while simultaneously developing toward the beyond, tomorrow, marking the expression of constant active resistance.

Careful observation reveals the suspension of the bench from the ground, which, on one hand, evokes total freedom of thought and the boundless possibilities of youth, while on the other highlights the fragility of its roots.

In the broader social landscape of the 2000s, humanity seems similarly situated, caught between the need to oppose and the uncertainty of how to do so (especially in the country), attached to the certainties that once sustained life but now deprived of them, without the support of the ideologies that guided the resistances of the 20th century, and following a different path—also of thought—to construct. A new child with a finger beyond the canvas.