Sporca estate

Lorenzo De Bellis’s work moves within the subtle space that separates experience from its narration. His is an autobiographical body of work composed of drawings, objects, images, and fragments. The aesthetic rendering of the stories that emerge from it does not describe reality, but moves through it, introducing subtle perceptual deviations that alter its apparent evidence. What matters is not the exceptional nature of the events being recounted, but rather the precision with which the impossible insinuates itself into the ordinary, as in a fairy tale. An egg left in the microwave for too long explodes. A broken window transforms into a box. A sofa remains the last piece of furniture left to sell. A road at night, the reflection of paint on a car, a distant coastline glimpsed across the sea. In the narratives accompanying the exhibition, minor and seemingly marginal episodes become thresholds through which the artist’s universe manifests itself, as if every object contained a latent possibility and every detail could open onto another dimension. Moving between archive and fabulation, De Bellis constructs environments suspended in the present, where thought can no longer be clearly distinguished from perception. The narrative thus emerges as both a device for orientation and disorientation: a form capable of making visible that which, while belonging to reality, continues to exceed any attempt to explain it. Produced during a brief period of work at Sonnenstube, the works presented in this first solo exhibition by the artist were built—almost all of them—directly within the space, through a process intertwining observation, the collection of traces, nights spent on the sofa, and the narrative transformation of found materials. The exhibition thus becomes not only a place in which the works are presented, but an integral part of their own story. On the occasion of *Sporca Estate*, a limited edition publication of 50 numbered copies, produced by Sonnenstube, is also presented as a narrative and material extension of the project. Conceived by the artist, the publication brings together a constellation of drawings and works that have guided him to this point. Lorenzo De Bellis (Milan, 1997) is an Italian visual artist who lives and works in Zurich and is currently an artist in residence at Binz39. He graduated from ECAL in 2024. His practice moves between drawing, installation, found objects, and writing, with an interest in essential and fragmentary visual forms. He uses residual materials and minimal gestures to investigate the relationship between objects, space, and the latent dimensions of everyday life, with a particular focus on the paranormal. Sonnenstube is a Lugano-based, itinerant off-space founded in 2013 that offers a regular, flexible, and sometimes unexpected programme. Sonnenstube is run by Giacomo Galletti (1993, curator), Giada Olivotto (1990, curator), Sandro Pianetti (1987, artist and interaction designer), Gabriel Stöckli (1991, artist), and Gianmaria Zanda (1985, artist and musician).