Yuval Avital – Con l’argilla dei nostri corpi

From November 6th to December 13th, 2025, BUILDING TERZO PIANO presents Con l’argilla dei nostri corpi, a solo exhibition by artist Yuval Avital, curated by Cristiano Leone. Represented exclusively by BUILDING, Avital returns to the gallery space with his second monographic exhibition, following the 2021 project E T E R E.

The new exhibition is dedicated to ceramics and clay, elements presented both as materials and subjects. The exhibition features a large collection of previously unseen works, including new sculptures and paintings created in collaboration with Italian master craftsmen, alongside some of the artist’s better-known sculptures. Con l’argilla dei nostri corpi, he explores the plastic and symbolic dimension of a profoundly human raw material that has become central to his practice.

This exhibition represents a new stage in the dialogue between Yuval Avital and Cristiano Leone, a partnership that began with Lessico Animale and has grown over the years through a deep affinity based on a shared vision of the work of art as a living organism, in which matter and thought reflect each other, generating spaces of sensory experience that combine conceptual rigor and poetic intensity.

The exhibition opens with a large-scale environmental installation welcoming visitors to BUILDING TERZO PIANO: a “theater” on the ground, composed of dozens of small and medium-sized sculptures, created between 2022 and 2025 using various ceramic techniques, including glazed and crystalline ceramics, engobes, polymerized and resin-coated clay, in dialogue with heterogeneous materials. The works are arranged as a silent and solemn multitude, similar to a crowd of subconscious presences brought onto a theatrical stage. The choice to place the works directly on the floor emphasizes the “earthly” dimension of clay. The layout invites a double reading: on the one hand, the choral impact of the installation; on the other, the uniqueness and expressive richness of each work, each individually contributing to form a motionless yet extraordinarily varied and lively audience. Exhibited behind of this theater, there is a selection of ceramic and stoneware Maschere sonore, created in 2019, and previously exhibited in European museums and institutions. The sculptures, arranged like a choir, evoke the iconographic, sonic, and ritual aspects and practices characteristic of his artistic research.

The exhibition also includes oil paintings on canvas from the series Vasi dell’anima (2023), in which the vessel becomes an archetype and symbol of the inner self and a metaphor for human fragility; and works from the Vasi terrestri series (2025), where the artist mixes self-hardening clay with clay powder, stucco, and vinyl glue to create two-dimensional works with a highly tactile appearance.
In the exhibition Con l’argilla dei nostri corpi, the artist’s iconography develops in the two- and three-dimensionality of painting and sculpture, dialoguing with the plastic and symbolic qualities of the material to bring it together in his vectors of research: the human, the subconscious, instinct, and ritual.

Clay, a living and collective material, preserves the body and shared memory. In Avital’s artistic practice, this material becomes language, body, and ritual: a sign of a gesture that unites, an echo of a shared time. In its silence remains the trace of touch, fragile and universal.

________________

Curatorial text by Cristiano Leone

An original breath inhabits in the earth. Clay is its visible form: a primordial material that welcomes and transmits, that collects the traces of those who shape it and sculpts memory into gesture. When I visited Yuval Avital’s studio—whose work I have been following for years as a necessary origin, a source that continues to generate, welcome, and transform, as the earth does with what it loves—I immediately recognized that his new production was born from this deep listening to matter, from that tension rising from the ground and expands towards the light. Everything in the exhibition responds to this call: Con l’argilla dei nostri corpi becomes the title, the landscape, and the spiritual horizon of a project celebrating origin and metamorphosis.

The title is inspired by the verses of the Persian mystic Omar Khayyām:

«With the clay of our bodies they make jugs and cups;
and of the jugs they say: I was like you, and you will become like me.»

These words convey the awareness that every form is a transition, that matter continues to live, that what is becomes what will be. In Avital’s vision, clay is flow, return, rebirth.

This exhibition is part of the artist’s trajectory but at the same time takes on an autonomous, distinct, and contemporary voice: matter as body and breath, in which the experience of the past evolves and liberates itself, becoming a powerful and present interlude, an act that takes place today, on earth, in the time we live in, in an ultra-contemporary way, because it is ancestral. The earth receives the gesture and preserves it; the gesture transforms it and gives it back it. In this dialectic, Avital recognizes the human condition: we are made of the same substance we step on, and from it we are continually reborn. It is a continuous regeneration.

In small ceramics, molded vases, and canvases traced with clay, we see this principle: creation is an uninterrupted cycle. Body, image, sound, voice, and gesture echo and merge into a single primordial language. The exhibition thus finds its visual form in this synthesis: on the one hand, raw earth; on the other, oil painting that reshapes it, like a song suspended between earth and sky. A dream, a nightmare? Perhaps a caress. It is essence that becomes representation, and representation that recalls essence.

The exhibition is conceived as a ritual: most of the works are arranged on the ground, where else?, along a crescent that embraces the gaze and restores the presence of the earth as origin and destination. On the opposite wall, there are sound masks, clay faces that emit breaths and sounds, blowing memories that have not yet happened. It is a telluric voice that makes itself heard, with the power of grace. This space, this scenographic gesture, recalls the ancient concept of theatron: a place not only of vision, but of openness to light. The radiance that passes through defines the creatures, families of human vases, tree women, spirits, animal vases, theaters, confessionals, earthly vases, cadavres exquis, and figures that are born and dissolve into the same matter, the breathing earth, the flesh of the world. They embrace each other, become protagonists, and make us protagonists of this small, immense theater of being.

Here we are: we are not spectators. We are participants. We enter the scene and become matter, or rather, we remember our matter. In this space of earth and sound, the sculptures breathe. Their stillness is a deep vibration, like a continuous bass line that runs through the substance of the world. Perhaps this is why, in moments when I myself seek a form of serenity, one that both shakes and caresses, I lie down on the ground. It is a simple but revealing gesture: it means listening to the vibrations that calm and awaken, that soothe and stir. Perhaps these figures, sitting on the floor, also discover the same truth: that the deepest peace comes from contact, and that the earth, before being a burden, is breath.

And so, in this parable of matter, two essential motifs emerge, both in anthropology and in the history of thought: the viator, the wayfarer who traverses the forms of the world, and the ubi sunt reges?, the question that seeks kings, bearers of light, those who have reigned and of whom only an echo remains, or sometimes not even that. Avital’s works evoke these archetypes: travelers of flesh and earth, kings who die and return to the ground. Every broken vase, every fragment, every shard tells the story: “I was elsewhere, now I am here; you will be what I have been.”

In this context, fragility becomes strength and transience becomes an ecosystem of relationships. The figures do not live in isolation: they form families, communities of bodies in dialogue with creation, with matter, with sound. The exhibition focuses on care as a necessary act, both political and spiritual. The humanity that Avital portrays is vulnerable and luminous, because it is capable of feeling. Matter and body merge, blend, and transfigure. The body becomes substance and substance becomes body: a movement that crosses the boundary between human and beyond-human.

In Avital’s work, body and matter interact until every distance between identity and form dissolves. Metamorphosis becomes restitution: the earth is not only memory, it is promise. Care is not only reflection, it is a constructive gesture. The families of earth that inhabit the floor of the room bear witness to an alliance: between man and landscape, between form and time, between what passes and what returns.

Ultimately, this exhibition invites us to recognize that what we are bodies of earth, carrying within us a vastness that is measured in depth, not in extension. True greatness does not dominate: it welcomes. In the modeled figures, in the vibrating sound, in the light that illuminates the scene, there lives the awareness that finitude is the condition of infinity. Matter transforms and leaves its mark.

This is Avital’s gesture: form becoming testimony, substance becoming song, voice becoming echo. Con l’argilla dei nostri corpi, it is an invitation to embrace fragility as a gateway to meaning, to rediscover in our proximity to the earth the possibility of a new verticality. It is an autonomous interlude in the artist’s creation: rooted in the past, it dialogues with the present and lives in the here and now. A gesture that springs from the earth, opens to the light and returns to the soil, generating more forms, more breaths, more life.