Gianluca Lattuada | Gran Museo del Mundo Maya

GRAN MUSEO DEL MUNDO MAYA · Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico

No time no space

Solo exhibition
July 28 – August 5, 2023
Promoted by the Secretariat of Culture and the Arts of Yucatán

The exhibition

Presented at the Gran Museo del Mundo Maya in Mérida, No time no space brought together a series of paintings developed by Gianluca Lattuada during his stay in Mexico. The exhibition established a dialogue between contemporary figurative painting, cultural memory and the symbolic traditions of the Yucatán Peninsula.

Taking its title from Franco Battiato’s 1985 song, the project investigated the possibility of moving beyond conventional boundaries of time, geography and cultural identity. Different historical references coexist within the same pictorial space, where mythology, everyday experience and contemporary sensibilities become part of a shared visual narrative.

The exhibition was promoted by the Secretariat of Culture and the Arts of Yucatán, contributing to an artistic exchange between Italy and Mexico.

Tele Yucatan – Mexican TV

Myth, time and the contemporary image

At the centre of the exhibition was an investigation into the persistence of myth within contemporary experience.

Drawing upon literary traditions, classical painting and symbolic imagery encountered in Mexico, Lattuada constructed compositions in which recognizable figures occupy situations suspended between reality and allegory.

Female figures assume a central role within these pictorial narratives. Their presence introduces a tension between vulnerability and control, stillness and violence, particularly in their encounters with animals and symbolic forces.

These images do not attempt to reconstruct ancient narratives or reproduce established iconographies. Instead, they reconsider the capacity of myth to articulate experiences that extend across different historical and cultural contexts.

The resulting works operate as contemporary fables, proposing connections between the present and forms of symbolic knowledge that continue to shape collective imagination.

Mexico as a visual language

The experience of Mexico informed both the visual vocabulary and material appearance of the paintings.

Lattuada drew particular attention to the surfaces of traditional buildings, where successive layers of colour, weathering and architectural transformation register the passage of time. These observations informed pictorial backgrounds in which colour becomes a record of duration rather than a purely decorative element.

Within these surfaces, references to the jaguar, the serpent, Maya glyphs, regional vegetation and local agricultural history introduce further layers of meaning. Elements associated with the cultural landscape of Yucatán coexist with figures and compositions developed through the artist’s broader visual research.

The paintings establish a dialogue between observation and interpretation, approaching cultural references not as isolated motifs but as elements within a changing network of relationships.

In this sense, No time no space considers the artwork as a meeting point between different experiences of place, memory and identity, where the distance between past and present becomes open to reconsideration.