Rossi & Rossi is pleased to present Luce Iconica, a solo exhibition by Italian artist Massimo Antonaci (b. 1958). On view from 6 December 2025 through 21 February 2026, the presentation marks his third solo project with the gallery.
The Italian word ‘luce’ translates to ‘light’, and the light revered in the works of Antonaci is absolute and pure. Luce Iconica highlights a series of works in gold, silver and white, all veiled by glass. Adhering to a 60 by 60 cm compositional guide, the artist has created virtual grids, where mental images intersect with space. In Cornerstone (2019), a slightly tilted glass pane rests atop a square of white paint, inviting viewers to look beyond the surface and see what the element truly embodies. As Antonaci noted in the catalogue from his 2019 retrospective at Rossi & Rossi Hong Kong, ‘When the reflection of consciousness no longer projects any image, the mental substance manifests itself in its own nature, which is colourless’. Here, the glass is a window that frames human sight as a medium of manifestation.
Recently, Antonaci has been exploring the metallic radiance of gold and silver. In L’oro, l’argento e la Caverna di Saturno (2002), the catalogue that accompanied the eponymous solo exhibition at Matteo Lampertico Fine Art in Milan, Italian writer and critic Marco Belpoliti ascribes the gold light to a divine realm: ‘however attractive, [it] will be difficult to pass through. In the wall there is gold, like a simulacrum of that world that wants to appear and escape, at the same time’. By contrast, he continues, the opposing silver emulates the imperfectness of human nature, ambivalent in the way that ‘one moment it shines and the next it sinks into dark patina’. The transcendence often experienced in Antonaci’s art is a work of balance, just as gold and silver perpetually repel and attract each other.
Built on his practice of assembling text, photos and postcards to project inner images from multiple journeys of pilgrimage, the artist offers a new work, Mythos (2025), for Luce Iconica, featuring clippings of vintage newspapers and books about Hong Kong. On a 3.7-metre-long scroll, fragments of image and text are obscured and sometimes layered. As the long-running sheet unfurls, the revelation of knowledge is made tactile.
To coincide with Luce Iconica, Rossi & Rossi is collaborating with Novalis Art Design to showcase a selection of furniture from their collection, including tables, chairs and lamps from Aldo Cibi, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Franz West and Bill Woodrow.
