PRESS RELEASE
The exhibition that has been animating the bctLab exhibition hall in Terni, Piazza della Repubblica, since June 18th has been extended until June 28th, offering those who have not yet had the chance to visit an extra week to immerse themselves in an artistic dialogue as unusual as it is necessary.
Under the same roof coexist two visions of the world that appear to be at opposite ends yet are in reality deeply complementary. On one side, Mario Napoletti with his series Parallel Worlds: large canvases in which myth and dreamlike imagery intertwine in dense, visionary compositions, populated by suspended figures, thinking statues, landscapes that exist only in humanity's deepest memory, where lush nature is not mere scenery but primordial memory and silent consciousness. His works are thresholds, passages between what we see and what we are called to understand — territories in which the sacred and the profane, the ancient and the contemporary, coexist without contradiction, offering the viewer not answers but open questions to be completed through their own gaze.
On the other side, in a counterpoint as surprising as it is effective, Gladys Maria de la Raba presents Coffee – Emotions – Fragility: fifteen small works, painted on packing cardboard, each dedicated to a coffee actually drunk in 2026 in Terni, Scheggino and other everyday places. Precise times, precise prices, receipts as certificates of existence. Where Napoletti opens the doors to the elsewhere and the infinite, de la Raba stubbornly fixes the here and now, the tiny and concrete instant in which a simple gesture — stirring a spoon in a cup — becomes a philosophical act, thought made matter. "I am the €1.20. He is the infinite", writes the artist about this dialogue, capturing with striking clarity the tension that runs through the entire exhibition.
Two languages, two scales, two completely different narrative rhythms — yet united by the same common thread: painting as a tool for investigating existence, as an invitation to slow down in a world that rushes, as a space in which to rediscover, whether through the broadest vision or the smallest detail, the lost meaning of things. Where Napoletti tells the story of humanity in its mythical and collective dimension, de la Raba tells it in its most intimate and everyday one — and it is precisely in this shift of perspective that the true strength of the exhibition lies: the discovery that the sublime and the everyday, the dream and the receipt, are not parallel worlds that never meet, but two different ways of asking the same, urgent question.
A unique opportunity, extended until June 28th, to traverse the infinite and the instant together, and discover that sometimes all it takes is a moment to truly stop and look at who we are.
A work of art lives in the invisible space between the one who paints and the one who watches. Mario Napoletti and Gladys Maria de la Raba know this, which is why they have chosen to be present throughout the exhibition, not merely as artists on display but as companions on a journey that is only complete in the encounter — even a brief one — through which one discovers that a painting is not a destination but an open question. And in the moment someone receives it, the work ceases to be an image and becomes a mirror, returning to the viewer a fragment of themselves they perhaps had not yet had the courage to see.
The exhibition is free of charge and open to the public at the bctLab exhibition hall, Piazza della Repubblica, Terni, until June 28th, 2026.
Contacts: https://www.instagram.com/gladysdelamari/ https://www.instagram.com/marionapoletti/ bct@comune.terni.it Tel. 0744 549051 Piazza della Repubblica 1, Terni
Contact:
https://www.instagram.com/gladysdelamari/
https://www.instagram.com/marionapoletti/
bct@comune.terni.it
0744 549051
Piazza della Repubblica, 1 Terni