‘Broken Blocks’ presents the first solo show by Italian artist Cosimo Casoni (1990, IT) at Valerius Gallery.

Rooted in everyday rural landscapes and architectural fragments, the exhibition explores the idea of home as both a physical place and a mental condition, shaped by memory, movement, and lived experience.

Blending references to the Macchiaioli tradition with post-graffiti influences and underground culture, Casoni develops a layered painterly language marked by synthesis and experimentation. Spray paint, finger marks, and the use of a skateboard as a tool of painting become integral to Casoni’s process where geometry and gesture coexist. The works come together as a “mental village,” suspended between figuration and abstraction, where structure provides the ground for freedom and continual exploration.

Cosimo Casoni, who lives between Grosseto and Milan, has studied Visual Arts and Painting at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA) in Milan, Italy. Recent exhibitions have been at Piermarq Gallery, Sydney (2025), IRL Gallery, New York (2025), The Finch Project, London (2025), Valerius Gallery, Luxembourg (2024).

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COSIMO CASONI — BROKEN BLOCKS

Born 1990 in Florence, Italy, Casoni lives and works between Grosseto and Milan, Italy.
Casoni studied Visual Arts and Painting at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA), Milan.

Cosimo Casoni’s practice unfolds at the intersection of art and everyday life, drawing from a visual world that is at once personal, architectural, and deeply rooted in lived experience. Born in Florence in 1990 and now living and working between the Maremma and Milan, Casoni engages with the landscapes he inhabits daily—rural roads, houses, rooftops, and peripheral spaces—transforming them into sites of pictorial investigation.

The works presented in ‘Broken blocks’ originate from fleeting encounters with ordinary environments, often first recorded through photography during travel. These images are later distilled through painting. Influenced by the Macchiaioli tradition, post-graffiti, and appropriation, Casoni constructs a bright, diurnal reality in which classicism, personal memory, and underground culture coexist. Rather than describing places, his paintings recompose them, allowing form and gesture to carry meaning.

Casoni’s process is structured through layers—overlaps, erasures, and cancellations—where action and reflection continuously alternate. Unconventional gestures, such as using a skateboard as an oversized brush, imprinting the surface with his fingers, are not performative excesses but integral tools. These interventions generate a surreal and nostalgic atmosphere. The smudges of dirt and color produced by Casoni’s performative acts erupt across the image, introducing a sense of controlled chaos. Yet, rather than disrupting the composition, these gestures maintain a delicate equilibrium between stillness and movement.

Although his work pursues synthesis, it resists stylistic singularity. Multiple visual and semiotic languages coexist within the same canvas, generating pictorial collages in which geometry provides a stabilizing framework. This tension between restlessness and order defines Casoni’s practice: structure becomes the space within which risk and experimentation can occur. Planning and improvisation, control and chance, are held in deliberate balance.

The recurring motif of the house functions as both subject and structure. It is a symbol of home understood not as a fixed place, but as a mutable mental and physical condition. Across the exhibition a dispersed ‘mental village’ is formed : a layered constellation of houses on the threshold of abstraction, suspended in a fragile and dynamic balance. Walls become landscapes, rooftops suggest movement, and space unfolds as a record of the creative process itself.

Devoid of a fixed or explicit narrative, the works invite viewers to move freely through them, as if across an open terrain. This apparent openness, however, is underpinned by a subtle narrative structure made up of fragmented and visible elements—traces of time, memory, and physical action. Through processes of layering, accumulation, and erosion, Casoni reconstructs reality as an image in constant dialogue with itself. Space becomes a record of its own formation, and painting emerges as an ongoing balance between control and spontaneity, structure and freedom.