Gallery Sweet Gallery - The nature of art

Gallery Sweet Gallery is a curatorial and exhibition program that, through the visual arts, explores the relationship between nature, landscape, and society. From 2015 to 2023, five editions of Gallery Sweet Gallery OUTDOOR were held in a park on the moors of Mariano Comense (Como).
A new curatorial and exhibition project is proposed for 2025.

Mazzèn. Simone Scardino
curated by Elena Isella
13 September - 26 October 2025
Former Butchers’s Shop F.lli Buzzi
via Santo Stefano 55, Mariano Comense (Como)
opening Saturday 13 September 2025 6:00 p.m.

The contemporary art exhibition Mazzèn. Simone Scardino, curated by Elena Isella, is part of Gallery Sweet Gallery. It is promoted by the Municipality of Mariano Comense and the Associazione Amici dei Musei Città di Cantù e del suo Territorio, in collaboration with La Bottega and with the contribution of BCC Cantù.

The project by Simone Scardino (Venaria Reale, 1995) takes shape inside the Former Butcher’s shop F.lli Buzzi in Mariano Comense, a place steeped in memory, where the imagery of meat - ordered, packaged, separated from its animal origins - becomes the starting point for a critical reflection on the contemporary relationship between humans, the environment, and non-human life forms. In the context of an ever-deepening ecological crisis, in which nature is reduced to a resource and biodiversity to material to be optimized, the butcher’s shop becomes a concrete and powerful metaphor. As happens in the butcher’s shop, where the animal’s body is dissected and rendered invisible, nature today is sold in the form of a pacified and fictitious image: a commodity to be consumed, a stage set for well-being, disconnected from the ecological networks and systemic violence that allow access to it. Like meat, so too is the plant world, which presents itself as an artificial, packaged, neutral object. And, in a broader vision, Nature, which in the contemporary imagination is a product to be consumed, pacified, purified from the complexity of the ecological relationships from which it originates.

The exhibition, whose title (mazzèn) is a dialect term that identifies the person who once killed the pig, features stacks of cold storage crates with soil stratigraphy, objets-trouvés (some originally used in the butcher’s shop), plant elements, photographic and documentary reproductions, and a video.