With the exhibition Alzarsi presto, RIBOT is pleased to present for the first time in Milan the work by Chiara Brambilla and Roberto Picchi, two artists who share a real and everyday intimacy with the natural environment and who give plastic form to the emotional and material complexity of living alongside the forest as a neighbor, the clearing as a courtyard, and the animal as an interlocutor.

Chiara Brambilla (Bergamo, 1999, where she lives and works) explores the relationship with wild animals inhabiting the surroundings of her home, with a particular focus on hunting practices and the narratives that have historically shaped their imagery. Starting from old black-and-white photographs—sometimes found, sometimes cut, sometimes reconstructed—her works delve into the grey areas of the relationship between humans and animals, hunting and care, play and domination, blending and confusing refuges and traps, instruments of protection and instruments of condemnation. In the exhibition, alongside images from her extensive archive (conceived both as a research tool and as an independent body of work), Brambilla presents a new series of papier-mâché sculptures: crouched hares with light bodies that seem suspended between two states—sleep and death, surrender and abandonment. Observing them is an exercise in empathy: one wonders whether to caress them or fear the gun that has rendered them motionless.

Roberto Picchi (Erba, 1996, where he lives and works), on the other hand, turns his gaze to the undergrowth—a place that is by definition shady and fertile, a theater of metamorphosis and home to silent organisms like mushrooms, bearers of complex and invisible relationships. Where light is scarce and forms multiply, Picchi collects marks, colors, and decompositions, transforming them into a site-specific installation that spreads like an organism across the gallery floor. Here, clusters of elements in beeswax and paraffin organize themselves into constellations that echo the visual contrasts of vegetative margins: the work expands, invites exploration, and is discovered step by step, like a path through the thicket. Even in the wall works, which look down upon this vibrant carpet, painting becomes sculpture, matter becomes landscape, and the fragment becomes narrative—a narrative where every detail is a trace of the fragile balance between life and decay.

Brambilla and Picchi share the habit—typical of both hunters and mushroom foragers—of setting out at dawn. It is in these early hours of the day that relationships of neighborliness with nature become most vivid. Alzarsi presto represents an attempt to give form to that proximity that can be sensed in the morning: a proximity to the animality that brushes against us, and to the landscape that outlives us, without rhetoric or instrumentalization, but with the naturalness of a genuine coexistence.