The exhibition Above Touch is a conversation between Andrea Sala (Como, 1976) and Mathieu Meijers (Stein, 1951). It shows how the work of these two artists, from different generations and countries, is surprisingly similar. This affinity is aptly described in a brief note written by Meijers explaining the exhibition title:

Touch initially refers to a way of realizing a work, to a specific craft, a technique, and a material. It refers to a sensibility in the use of the hands. In this sense, it is a close act.
Touch can also be a scan with the eyes. It can be an act from a distance, and by doing this it becomes an exploration of all the senses.
Above Touch refers to a poetic appeal to the viewer. To the awareness of the spiritual condition of the creative act, as we place the poetic in a higher realm.
A blind and intuitive touch of materialization that enlightens the understanding of life.

“I don’t see anything, I only paint thoughts”, says MATHIEU MEIJERS. And the most fundamental of these thoughts concern representation, perception and painting itself. Reduced to its essence, Meijers’ work is about the light that makes all this possible.
Meijers grew up in Stein as the son of a miner. His father worked 800 metres underground, spending half his life in darkness. As an artist concerned with light—a phenomenon that is inherently historical, since the rays we perceive have been travelling for millions of years—Meijers does not operate solely in the here and now of reality. Instead, his intention is to create a new reality, a material one drawing from the repository of images that feels most authentic to him: his own memories. Motifs from his youth include pears, cargo ships, and a Volkswagen Beetle, but also the abstract form of a window frame. By repeating these motifs, they become archetypes—symbols loaded with associative meaning yet remaining the concrete things they are. Through the act of painting, with each repetition, new layers of meaning continuously unfold.

In 2002, Meijers abruptly decided to stop painting. He shifted to drawing, a much faster and more direct form of expression. His drawings developed into series with a narrative streak and are sometimes collected in books. Gradually, Meijers began adding colour to his drawings and painting found its way back into his work. In 2016, he began devising colour schemes in which he felt freer than in the autobiographically informed narrative, schemes that challenge—and perhaps even transcend—the boundaries of painting.
In Meijers’ process technology and methods are less important than the image produced and his preference for paper is based on the material’s structural and visual vulnerability. He is a huge aficionado of Trecento art, with its human forms and architecture, its gold, and late-Byzantine stylization. With his words:

“I enjoy gold because it covers like black does. My gold is the material container of my feelings, and it doesn’t belong to today’s world. Over the past two years, gold has made way for the soft white of palladium and the hard white of platinum. These precious metals are ambiguous: they are not in, but before, the here and now—they belong to the future.”


ANDREA SALA presents new works exploring sculpture as a means of connecting body, object, and space. The artist’s gaze, previously focused on the inner and domestic world, now opens to a broader horizon, while remaining connected to the temporal and spatial customs typical of private rituals. It is about our way of looking, fixing, and interpreting the world; sculpture thus becomes a lens, a margin, and a synthesis between what we are and what surrounds us.

Serviti/Pomodori is a series of glazed terracottas depicting a section of a Cuore di Bue tomato. The tomato, cut and ready to be eaten, is transformed into an ambiguous object: it is nature on offer, but also an exposed body. The glazed surfaces, lively and irregular, evoke a living, transforming material that suggests boiling water or magma. The sculptures seem to retain an inner energy, a heat that speaks of cooking, time, and metamorphosis, echoing organic processes, fermentations, and alterations. There is a memory of an everyday gesture, but also an archaic echo, as if they are relics of ancient agricultural or domestic rituals.

In Di terra, di buchi e di nuvole Sala returns to travertine, choosing its porosity as fertile ground to explore the passage of time in landscapes in relation to the time of memory. The sculptures, placed on the ground, appear as fragments emerging from an interior topography. On the back, pigments leave light traces and heraldic combinations, almost shadows of a geography in motion. The straight lines, reminiscent of window frames, attempt to capture portions of the landscape in contrast to forms that evoke clouds in motion and dissolution, where the imperfections of the material—breaks, fissures, voids—become an active part of the sculptural gesture.