Matteo Viglietta Award

“For its irony, poetry, and ability to open up potentially infinite questions — ones that reflect outward, toward the cosmos, and inward, into the depths of our unconscious — the Collezione La Gaia has chosen to award the Italian artist Davide Stucchi for his work “Rising, falling, looking for the sun” (2025), presented by Martina Simeti Gallery.
The piece, created using industrial and everyday materials, embodies the philosophy that has always guided the Collezione La Gaia in its relationship with creativity: an art that takes shape within the folds of daily life and manifests itself through any expressive medium. This work is a brief, unwritten story in which each of us can recognize ourselves — as a modern Icarus, or a frustrated Narcissus — and, like life itself, perhaps it returns to us the very image we “make” of it.”

“The work of Francesca Cataldi is a hybrid object suspended between the dimensions of sculpture and narrative, in which the industrial elements, often recycled, overlap pictures, writing and natural agents. The layering of these materials accompanies a layering of thought that the artist has developed to explore where material is transformed into a language that is constantly remodeled.
To quote the words of the artists "The layering of thoughts one over the other becomes a matter of supposition. As I layer one thought over another to make a speech and expand it, so I think that, overlapping a structure with different materials develops an aesthetic thought" Athathari is at the same time a book and an object that is the result of the combination of traces and plastic and metal inserts, clearly relevant to the industrial material and work instruments particular to Viglietta Matteo Spa.”

“The Matteo Viglietta Award this year is awarded to the artist Igor Grubić of the Laveronica Gallery of Modica, with the acquisition of a group of photographs from the series Small Acts of Power (2023). The Croatian artist led research in the Greek city of Elefsina (the ancient Eleusi, known historically for its mystical rites) and its industrial past.
Meeting up with workers of different generations, employed in the industry of Elefsina, he asked them to chose an object that was important for their present or past job. He then photographed only their hands with the chosen object and added words from their testimony. This work is therefore a series of portraits that we could define as conceptual, merely hinted out, like a synecdoche, where a detail expresses and transmits an identity and their story, both personal and collective.
The formal layout of the photographic composition, the radical nature of the themes and their relation to the history and values of the Viglietta Matteo SpA, have contributed to the jury choosing this work of art.”