Alessandro Fogo

Lyles & King is pleased to present Distopica, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Alessandro Fogo (b. 1992; Thiene, IT). This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

In Fogo’s enigmatic compositions, the ancient and the contemporary collapse into one another. His paintings draw on mythology, alchemy, and mystical symbolism, excavating imagery like an archaeologist in search of artifacts. Layering historical motifs with familiar objects, Fogo builds fictional realities that feel both timeless and futuristic—worlds that hold the residue of ritual and the shimmer of simulation.

The exhibition unfolds around a series of painterly oxymorons: organic and artificial, life and death, tangible and spectral. Each canvas functions as a closed system suspended in ambiguity. The recurring motif of the black hole—“a kind of short circuit,” as Fogo describes it—disturbs the rational progression of the image. It absorbs light, matter, and meaning, offering instead a space of projection and reflection.

Fogo’s new works evoke contemporary vanitas, populated with memento mori: skulls, sunflowers, shells, masks, and statues. These symbols, charged with existential searching and sacred stillness, destabilize the physical consistency of the world. Weight is reversed; density dissolves. As Fogo notes, “Painting itself is a kind of alchemy. Something that should be heavy can float, or become a spirit.”

The artist’s earthy palette evokes clay, soil, and permanence, yet it is punctuated by flashes of saturated, artificial color—psychedelic hues that rupture the pictorial space and suggest a digital surface. These oleographic reflections lend the works an uncanny, virtual sheen. “They remind me of something projected by a machine,” Fogo says. “A machine’s dream.”

Figures drift in and out of human form, caught between embodiment and abstraction. What emerges is a distopica condition—an atmosphere of unease and estrangement where reality feels both hyper-real and eroded, as if filtered through memory or simulation. Fogo does not offer resolution. Instead, his paintings hold questions in suspension.

Alessandro Fogo (b. 1992; Thiene, IT) received an MFA from Royal Academy of Fine Arts and a BFA from Università luav di Venezia. He has had solo exhibitions at Fondazione Coppola, Vicenza, IT; Musei Civici Palazzo Buonaccorsi, Macerata, IT; Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai, CN; Cassina Projects, Milan, IT; PM/AM Gallery, London, UK; and Lyles & King, New York, US; among others. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Cassina Projects, Milan, IT; Beacon Contemporary, Munich, DE ; Palazzo Rota, Fermo, IT; Fondazione Smart, Rome, IT; Forte Malatesta, Ascoli Piceno, IT; Mamoth gallery, London, UK; Museo Civico G. Fattori, Livorno, IT; Galleria Continua, Palazzina dei Bagni Misteriosi, Milano, IT; and Chapelle de Boondael, Brussels, BE. Fogo’s work is in the collections of Fondazione Bonollo, IT; Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, Rizhao, CN; Star Museum, Shanghai, CN; Collezione Caspari, Munich, DE; Collezione Maramotti, IT; Newman Collection, FR; Collezione Gnutti-Beretta, IT; Collezione Iannaccone, IT; Kontemporay, KR; and Fondazione Coppola, IT. The artist lives and works in San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy.