EXHIBITIONS
I’ll Be There to Drink Your Tears
Museo Paleobotanico – Martis (SS)
Corso Umberto I, 12
curated by Eleonora Angiolini
Curated by Eleonora Angiolini, the exhibition brings together recent paintings by Cardia and Sotgiu, two practices situated at opposite ends of a broad spectrum of possibilities within contemporary painting. While Sotgiu constructs quiet, carefully calibrated images rooted in the photographic observation of everyday life, Cardia entrusts the construction of the painting to matter and gesture, allowing forms and tensions to emerge through the creative process itself.
The title, I’ll Be There to Drink Your Tears, introduces an intimate and ambivalent relationship, suspended between proximity and the crossing of boundaries into another person’s emotional territory. Drinking another’s tears can be understood as an act of care, a desire for sharing, or an appropriation of an emotional experience that does not entirely belong to us. It is within this zone of ambiguity that the encounter between the two artists unfolds: a dialogue which, despite starting from opposing formal premises, reveals unexpected affinities around memory, affectivity, and the ways in which everyday experience is translated into images.
“Inconvenience is the cost of community, I repeat to myself as I climb six flights of stairs for my friend’s birthday party for her cat.”
Victoria Abraham, @fatfabfeminist, X (Twitter), 20 August 2025
Proximity is never neutral. To approach something already means to transform it: to translate distance into form, to turn an experience that might otherwise remain inaccessible to our perception of the world into something that can be understood, accessed and shared. It is from this premise that I’ll Be There to Drink Your Tears brings together two painting practices that explore distinct possibilities for painting and different ways in which experience settles into an image. In Rachele Sotgiu’s work, this occurs through a process of collecting, observing and slowly sedimenting visual material drawn from contemporary visual culture and domestic space; in Cardia’s work, through a direct relationship with nature and personal experience, translated into gesture and matter on the painted surface.
The exhibition is also connected to an invitation extended to Cardia to spend a month in residence in Martis, where the painter transformed the gymnasium of the village’s former middle school into her studio. During May 2026, she was able to create Duna, the largest canvas included in the exhibition. This opportunity redefined the artist’s workspace not only as a place of production, but also as a state of suspended time, contained within a predetermined period. The exhibition layout follows a similar logic, establishing a rhythm between the works akin to a time that is extended yet discontinuous. Irregular intervals between the walls make the dialogue between the two painting practices continuously negotiable and open.
In Sotgiu’s artistic practice, painting is preceded by a continuous process of visual accumulation: a sustained attention to contemporary culture, fashion and its systems of representation, and to symbolic objects understood not as an iconographic repertoire, but as a field of recurring and recognisable codes. Photography and drawing often operate as preliminary recording devices before giving way to painting, which unfolds as a strongly temporal and suspended process, in which the image can be erased, reactivated and rewritten. The result is a practice in which the painting progressively distances itself from its point of origin, relinquishing a documentary function while retaining a perceptual and affective density situated between individual memory and references to symbols and structures deeply embedded in contemporary visual culture.
In Cardia’s work, by contrast, the image does not precede the painting; rather, the painted surface comes into being through the process itself. Gesture, matter and layering define a process in which form is never predetermined, but emerges through successive layers of sedimentation. Throughout this process, the presence of nature can be constantly perceived—not explicitly declared or translated into recognisable imagery, but legible in rhythm, colour and dynamics of accumulation, erosion and transformation. The works take shape as a two-dimensional space of interaction between body, matter and environment, in which these elements influence one another without ever resolving into a recognisable representation of reality.
The exhibition brings together works from three bodies of work by each artist. The specificity of their respective practices and the ambiguous intensity of their proximity become particularly evident on one wall in the second room, where a group of small-format works from Sotgiu’s Faire ses ongles series and paintings from Cardia’s Delle lacrime e delle onde series are arranged in a closely spaced rhythm. Here, scale becomes a form of unresolved intimacy, opening a space for dialogue entrusted to colour and to the distribution of marks across the pictorial space.
It is within this condition of unstable proximity that the exhibition and the experience shaped by I’ll Be There to Drink Your Tears take form: a possibility of relationship that does not settle into a single meaning, but remains traversed by a continuous tension between proximity and distance, between what can be shared and what remains irreducibly foreign in relation to the other. Just as choosing to drink another’s tears can be understood as an act of care, a desire for sharing or, at times, a form of appropriation of an emotion that can never entirely belong to us.
Eleonora Angiolini
Installation view by Francesca Truddaiu