LUCA LOMBARDI
The Rhythm of Things
Opening: 15 April 2026, 7:30–10:30 pm
Exhibition dates: 16 April–15 May 2026
Venue: Il SANTA, Via Melchiorre Gioia 37, 20124 Milan
Hours: Monday to Friday, 10:30 am–6:00 pm
Curated by Glenda Cinquegrana
Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is pleased to present, in collaboration with chef Stefano Grandi of Il SANTA, Milan, The Rhythm of Things, a solo exhibition by Luca Lombardi. The project takes shape from the desire to activate a tangible synergy between art and taste: a multidisciplinary proposition in which the artwork and the culinary experience are brought into proximity not through mere aesthetic affinity, but to generate a shared interpretive field.
During Milanese Art Week, the gallery extends into the spaces of Il SANTA, the Milanese restaurant directed by chef Stefano Grandi. Conceived as a site-specific intervention, Lombardi’s works recalibrate the perception of the environment through rhythm, light, and chromatic stratification; on the other hand, Grandi presents a menu specifically designed for the project, drawing its cues from the artist’s painting.
At the core of Lombardi’s research lies a sustained reflection on gesture and its contemporary mutations. If, in painting, gesture has long marked the point of contact between intention and matter, Lombardi takes the swipe, the everyday motion of scrolling through images and videos on a screen, as a foundational gesture for his work. Standardised and seemingly undramatic, it is nonetheless radical in its effects. Each passage replaces the previous one: the mark does not assert, but consumes and cancels. Within this dynamic, painting becomes the site where trace registers absence, colour acting as an index of continuous, rapid, potentially infinite consumption, in which images, information, and time overlap without settling into consciousness.
Through a measured use of layered applications and sinuous forms, Lombardi constructs pictorial fields in which colour occupies the entire surface of the canvas, radiating an inner luminosity that recalls the glow of screens. What emerges is a painting that does not describe so much as it activates: a visual experience in which rhythm is not only a subject, but a condition of seeing.
In dialogue with this framework, Stefano Grandi develops a gastronomic itinerary for each day of the exhibition—one that intercepts the slower rhythms of nature and spring, bringing them into resonance with Lombardi’s softened chromatic range. The menu reads seasonal rebirth as both a natural cadence and a contemporary measure of time: a temporality that repeats and renews itself, as the exhibition’s title suggests.