FRICTIONAL GEOGRAPHY
Josefina Ayllón, Terence Birch, Giuseppe De Mattia, Joachim Lenz, Davide Mancini Zanchi, Marta Mancini, Beatrice Meoni, Ivan Seal
March 7 > April 18, 2026
Following the exhibition Viaggi / Journeys, presented in London last July, and Another Look at Reintegra Fine Art, A+B, Alma Pearl, Matèria, and z2o Sara Zanin, the galleries come together for the third installment of their shared dialogue in Geography of Friction, which opens on Saturday, March 7, 2026, in Brescia at A+B Gallery.
If traditional geography organizes, delimits, and assigns fixed positions, Geography of Friction proposes an unstable map, defined by points of resistance rather than coordinates. The exhibition invites viewers to traverse a territory where the artwork is, more than a destination, an interruption, a temporal dilation, a generative slowdown. The unexpected alters the very way of proceeding and, by reflection, of knowing the world through painting.
The exhibition brings together surfaces and fragments made intense by the materiality of paint, the possible narratives, irony, and staging strategies capable of modifying the trajectory of ordinary vision. The resulting friction is to be understood as an active experience that reorganizes the geography of the visible and transforms observation into a form of proximity between body and memory.
The works of the eight participating artists — Josefina Ayllón, Terence Birch, Giuseppe De Mattia, Joachim Lenz, Davide Mancini Zanchi, Marta Mancini, Beatrice Meoni, Ivan Seal — are conceived to shape non-linear narratives. Acting as artifacts that reappear in shared space, they render the fragment a productive element of warmth, of living residues. The exhibition inhabits the gap, suggesting that meaning manifests precisely in the gesture of losing habitual linearity to discover new trajectories of significance.
Josefina Ayllón (Argentina, 1973). Lives and works in Rome, Italy. Josefina Ayllón is an Italian-Argentine self-taught painter. In her artworks she explores, mainly through the portrait, the possibilities of painting, deliberately moving away from academicism and prioritising the colour and materiality of the paint. Since the age of 21, she has lived between Rome, Buenos Aires and Paris.
Terence Birch (UK, 1982), lives and works in London. Through painting, sculpture, and drawing, he investigates social stereotypes around disability, masculinity, and aesthetic prejudice, questioning where self-confidence may reside. Drawing on literature, social history, and key moments in art history, he constructs limited and obstructed forms, juxtaposing incongruous objects and materials to create tension between reality and fiction, harmony and dissonance. He graduated from Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art, has received awards and residencies, and has exhibited in solo and group shows in the United Kingdom and across Europe. Among group exhibitions: Between The Acts, Alma Pearl, London (2026); Positions, part three, Alma Pearl, London (2024); Ensemble, curated by Hettie James and Stephanie Farmer and supported by Arts Council England, APT Gallery, London (2024); CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo, Venice, curated by David Hevey (2024); In Out There, Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester (2018).
Giuseppe De Mattia (Bari, 1980) Using different languages—video, photography, sound, drawing, painting, installation, but also attitudes—and working in contexts that vary greatly from one another (from institutional settings to more independent spaces, which he engages with consistently), Giuseppe De Mattia reflects on the connections that exist between archives, private memory, and collective memory. As a keen observer of the contemporary art scene, De Mattia’s work often addresses structural issues related to the economics of the arts, articulated through a dialogue between irony, satire, and incisive critique. Seemingly fragmented, De Mattia’s practice is in fact a broad narrative ultimately centered on a primary theme: the process of democratization in society, explored through different processes and levels of formalization. Playing with stereotypes, breaking down barriers, and conceiving of art as a plural medium through which to investigate the boundaries between reality and fiction, between memory and prejudice, represents for De Mattia a kind of free obsession—one that he pursues with steady and brilliant commitment through an autonomous and, in some respects, self-sufficient path. He lives and works between Bologna and Noha (Lecce). Among his most recent exhibitions: Facile ironia. L’ironia nell’arte italiana tra XX e XXI secolo, MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (2025); Visita di cortesia, Banquet – Milan (2024); Tombaroli maledetti, Fondazione Zimei – Pescara (2024); Edificio Parlante, San Salvador (2024); Oggetti privati, pettegolezzi e altre storie, with Dynamo Camp (2024); Nature is Quite Easy, REDGE Contemporary Art Center – Chengdu (2024).
Joachim Lenz (1981, Germany) places the complex pleasure of the painterly act at the center of his research. His works, suspended between naturalism and unreality, create ambiguous atmospheres that oscillate between humor, paradox, and catastrophe. Rather than reproducing reality, Lenz constructs images that reveal its psychological dimension, challenging our visual habits and incorporating absurdity, anticipation, and a profound inner tension. The artist lives and works in Berlin. He studied painting at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München under Sean Scully and Günther Förg. In 2004 and 2005 he studied at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Facultad de Bellas Artes). His work is included in international private collections. Recent group exhibitions include Galleria Credo Bonum (Sofia, 2023), Galleria Obscura (Seoul, 2022), and Atelierhof Kreuzberg (Berlin, 2022). Solo presentations of his work have been held at One Kids Museum (Seoul, 2024), Pförtnerhaus Off Space (Freiburg, 2024), and Matèria (Rome, 2022).
Davide Mancini Zanchi (Urbino, 1986) He bases his research on paradox as a critical device: his works put cultural codes and social mechanisms into tension, generating visual and conceptual short circuits. His practice inhabits a suspended dimension, a dilated time in which waiting and pause become the very material of the artwork, understood as a space of possibility and reflection. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino. Since 2014, he has exhibited in galleries and institutions including A+B Gallery (Brescia), MAC Lissone (where he was awarded the Painting Prize), Centro Arti Visive Pescheria (Pesaro), and Fondazione Pastificio Cerere (Rome). In 2020, he was awarded the Italian Council, leading to a residency in Montevideo, and published his catalog Monochromo (Cura Edizioni).
Marta Mancini (Rome, 1981) In Marta Mancini’s practice, each cycle emerges in a dialectical relationship with the previous one, as a continuation of an ongoing dialogue with the medium of painting. From the aesthetic and psychological dimension of her early landscapes, the artist moves toward the construction of a metapictorial space, born from an intuitive accumulation of brushstrokes and subsequently refined through a process of subtraction. This new series of works thus takes shape as an evolution marked by ruptures, generated through the constant redefinition of scale, style, and color palette. The tension running through Mancini’s paintings invites reflection on the dual nature of painting — both illusion and object — reactivating fundamental aesthetic categories such as beauty, the grotesque, the picturesque, representation, and gesture. Within the genealogy of the works presented by Mancini at Artissima, created between 2024 and 2025 — restless heirs to the Buds series, which formed the core of her 2022 solo exhibition of the same name at Matèria, curated by Cecilia Canziani — one can discern a common thread that, as is typical of the artist’s process, organically connects them to the preceding cycle. With this new body of work, the fragmented language explored by Mancini appears to intensify in the search for a primordial impulse capable of emancipating itself from formal constructions, opening a new direction of inquiry within her tireless pictorial research.. She lives and works in Rome, where she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2006. Selected solo and group exhibitions include: Pittura italiana oggi, curated by D. Gullì, Triennale Milano (2023); Ineffable Worlds, curated by G. Benassi and M. Sena, Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong (2021); Buds, curated by C. Canziani, Matèria, Rome (2022–23); La molla, curated by P. Guaglianone, Matèria, Rome (2018); Ipercorpo – La pratica quotidiana, curated by D. Ferri, Oratorio di San Sebastiano, Forlì (2019); Lissone Prize for Painting, curated by A. Zanchetta, MAC – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Lissone–Milan (2018); La vita della mente, curated by G. Benassi, Swiss Institute, Rome (2017). She has also participated in residencies and research programs dedicated to contemporary painting.
Beatrice Meoni (Florence, 1960) lives and works in Sarzana. After earning a degree in Foreign Literatures and pursuing a career as a set designer, since 2005 she has mainly dedicated herself to painting, exploring its relationships with gesture and space. As Davide Ferri writes: “It is a blind painting that arrives at the image of the body and appropriates an experience belonging to the artist’s body, a different posture based on proprioception, the sense of one’s own body in space.” Recent exhibitions include Domus meus, Paul Smith Space, London (2024); Pittura italiana oggi, curated by Damiano Gullì, Triennale Milano (2023); Quadri come luoghi, curated by Davide Ferri, Palazzo Adorni, Capriolo (2023); Io dico Io – I say I, curated by Cecilia Canziani, Lara Conte, and Paola Ugolini, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome (2021).
Ivan Seal (Stockport, UK, 1973) explores memory and imagination by translating inner experience into painting and sound. His still lifes are generated from recollection rather than observation; they emerge from textured surfaces where forms oscillate between construction and dissolution, and backgrounds appear suspended and unstable. His sound projects – including his collaboration with The Caretaker – further expand his reflection on fragmentation and loss. His work has been presented at prestigious institutions such as the Barbican Centre in London, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, and the PODO Museum in South Korea, as well as in numerous international solo and group exhibitions, including Perhaps Sunny Days, PODO Museum, Seogwipo, South Korea (2024); against the day after before, The Hole, New York (2024); Polireality, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2023); Positions, Alma Pearl, London (2023); Today Rots Through Tomorrow, Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); and Three Rooms, Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, United Kingdom (2021); everywhere, an empty bliss, FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France (2019); and In Here Stands It, Spike Island, Bristol (2012). .