A spotlight can transform quite a bit with an economy of means, making something instantly visible, no matter how small or familiar. Post-winter sunlight can achieve a similar effect, which is why “The Spring Awakening” was an apt title choice for the program of exhibitions, openings, and performances organized around this year’s miart fair. Although everything under its purview was already on the urban map, miart’s new ventures made the local network of artists, institutions, and galleries look fresher and more energetic, signaling a positive shift within the cultural sphere. Milan’s contemporary art scene seems to be finally catching up with the success of the city’s annual furnishing design bash Salone Internazionale del Mobile, perhaps by emulating its three-part format: a serious fair to busy one’s self for half the day; a range of things to see about town for the other half; and a wide array of social gatherings. On Friday night at 1 a.m., when I stopped by at the Ulrico Hoepli Planetarium to see Stan VanDerBeek’s Cine Dreams: Future Cinema of The Mind (1972/2014)—an immersive installation of over 50 16mm films and slide projections presented for the first time in its entirety since its premiere—the queue outside …

There is an expression I learned as a child when I took my first English classes that never stopped generating sequences of absurdist pictures in my mind: “Not enough room to swing a cat.” Over and over again, I imagine the cat, the swing, and the room in variable combinations and sizes, all enmeshed in an improbable ménage à trois. None of them can be verified, nor tested in reality: to me, they are pure mental imagery. Strangely enough, the artistic duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva reactivated my odd, feline-generating imagination with their eerie short story about swinging a cat out of a room. In fact it functions as the introductory text for their current exhibition at Galleria Zero, which serves as a kind of precursor to their upcoming solo show at HangarBicocca in Milan next year. Part of the story goes like this: “This particular incident is related to another artistic achievement from the Portuguese duo, when Paiva and Gusmão had a studio on a 3rd floor apartment they started resenting the constant urge for caressing from their pet Mimi, a grey spotted domestic cat, but instead of kindly showing Mimi the front door leading down to the …

Coming from a conceptual background with little connection to anything that moves, I have long been trying to understand what is at the core of the definition of the cinematic. The shattered space full of tiny wood objects, naïve drawings, photographs, photocopies, and roost-like structures for watching and listening to video projections, which constitutes Neïl Beloufa’s exhibition, opened the possibility of giving meaning to just such a word. The gallery space is fragmented into irregular areas, many of them defined by minimal thresholds, such as delicate wooden structures or thin MDF half-walls. (One day someone will reflect upon the artistic use of the fiberboard on the early millennium and its symbolic value). Large, flat, green-painted surfaces prevail, and the inclusion of such impenetrable elements is a recurrent motive in many of Beloufa’s installations. In the guise of the blue-screen (which, in this case, is green) against which action is shot in the movies so that it can be superimposed by other sets, these green layers constitute a background that is not meant to exist—it is, in fact, an element that prepares our acceptance of filmic illusion or, rather, reinforces our acceptance of illusion, even in unlikely and technically imperfect cases. This …