Domus

Art Exhibition Giona Maiarelli (b.Milan, Italy 1960)

Giona Maiarelli lives and works primarily on Long Island. This series, which is a breakaway from his previous collage work, was created during an extended stay in his hometown of Udine, Italy, during the summer of 2026.

DOMUS Domus, Latin for “home”, is the place where my memories reside. This series continues my investigation into existing images that are, in a sense, “stolen.” Unlike my earlier collages, in which found images are removed from their original contexts and transformed through juxtaposition, here the images retain their original meaning. A bedroom remains a bedroom: scanned and printed without alteration precisely because it is that bedroom, imbued with associations, histories, and memories. The initial impulse for this work, as well as its title, came from a collection of Domus magazines from the 1950s, the Italian design and architecture magazine founded by Gio Ponti in 1928. The magazine became a point of departure for thinking about domestic space not simply as a physical environment, but as a repository of cultural and personal memory. With Domus, I turn my gaze away, for the first time, from the landscape and the American imagery that have informed much of my previous work. Instead, I return to the places where my own memories reside: Italian interiors and landscapes associated with childhood, recalled through the visual language of black-and-white photographs and the grainy images of television that ride below the surface of my memory. This shift also marks a change in my relationship to the found image. In earlier works, I allowed myself to be guided largely by the randomness and chance of the images I encountered and then rearranged. In Domus, I assert greater control over the composition and the finished work. Geometric forms and primary colors are introduced deliberately, creating a tension between the specificity of the photographic image and the constructed language of painting. I mixed quartzite into gouache to intensify the physical, three-dimensional quality of the painted surface against the printed photographs. The mineral material introduces another kind of presence: something geological and ancient against images that function as vessels for personal and cultural memory. During the development of the series, I began incorporating images from a geology textbook. I made these works during the summer of 2026, amid record-breaking temperatures. The experience prompted me to consider the consequences of human exploitation of our shared home, the Earth, and particularly the disproportionate impact of industrialized societies. The meaning of domus therefore expands beyond the personal space of the home. It becomes both intimate and planetary: the bedroom, the landscape, the country of childhood, and ultimately the Earth itself. The series moves between memory and matter, between the constructed spaces we inhabit and the geological world beneath them, asking what it means to call something home, and what happens when the place we all share is transformed by our own actions.

Domus #1 – #13 cm 29,7 x 42 Fine Art Giclée carbon pigment print on Vision Matt 300gsm, 100% cotton paper, gouache and quartzite