All Down on the Ground

   A Story

The first day I arrived in London, I rushed to an opening to which Francesca had invited me, someone I hadn’t met before. For this reason, I didn’t feel comfortable introducing myself; I saw the exhibition and then went to catch the bus.

While walking toward the stop, I thought of sending her a message to compliment her work; she replied, inviting me to meet her at the pub.

At that moment, my phone died. I had been in London for only two hours and had no idea how to get home, so I decided to try and find this pub, hoping to charge my phone and use Google Maps.

I wandered around South London for forty minutes, asking a passerby where the nearest pub was, but she wasn’t in any of the ones she had pointed me to.I followed a group of young people who seemed familiar from the exhibition.

Finally found the pub, plugged in my phone, and ordered a beer.A guy behind me was being ignored by the bartender, so I asked if he wanted a sip of mine while waiting.

We started talking.I told him I was Italian;he said he had recently been to SanCasciano, a very small, little-known village near Florence.

Immediately, I understood

“Do you know Hugo?”

-“Yes.”

Meanwhile, I saw Francesca coming out of the bathroom. Shenoticedme, joined us, and we discovered that most of the people in that pub knew one of my dearest friends in Italy. Many had shared a studio with him during the brief period he had lived in London.

We moved from one pub to another, then another; karaoke, and at five in the morning, I was home.

AllDownontheGrounddraws from a real experience and is an invitation to look down, toward the surface of the real.

When we had to select the artists for the exhibition, I immediately thought of them. One mutual friend traced the connection between us and our works; it was about shared experiences, and there was nothing more real.

The theme of the show resonates both in the narratives depicted on the canvases and in the very language of painting itself. It does so by presenting Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden, urban landscapes, people falling, elements of popular culture, and raw canvases, textures of everyday life. Construction and decay.  

The exhibition was born from chance encounters and fleeting moments, which often shape both artistic practice and human connection. At its core, it speaks about reality, and thus about chance itself. It reflects on the unpredictability of existence and, because of that, offers a gentle invitation to take it all a little less seriously, presenting the human drama with a touch of irony.

Galleria Objets is a living space to be experienced and inhabited. It rejects elitism in art, embracing inclusivity, choosing instead to stay grounded and in shared human presence.

Grazia Mori