NURIA MORA
Underwater Love

Martina Corbetta_Via Milano, 98. Giussano (MB)
17.12.2025 – 06.03.2026

Underwater Love was born from a thought: that of the sea as a place where perception alters and humanity loses its certainties. Like the song by Smoke City, which describes a love as enveloping as water, warm and enveloping, the exhibition is a place to immerse oneself, a place where the body ceases to think and opens to a more intimate, somewhat magical dimension. The space becomes simultaneously dreamlike and psychedelic, like an uncontrollable emotion. This immersion connects to Lawrence Durrell’s idea in Clea: in the sea, anthropocentrism dissolves because there is no solid ground to support human arrogance, only depths, currents, and creatures. Diving means accepting that life does not entirely belong to us; it means entering a territory where humanity loses its certainties. Hence, Underwater Love was born: the sea as a metaphor for shipwreck understood as possibility.

The exhibition features sculptures, paintings, and graphics, along with a large interactive installation. At the entrance, we are greeted by ceramic apples of various sizes—more precisely, eaten apples. The Bitten Apples series represents a serires of work that symbolizes the first act of rebellion and free will. A gesture that breaks with passivity and fully enters the realm of experience and risk. It represents the beginning of humanity as a conscious subject, told not through sin, but through consciousness as an individual impulse. The apple, fruit of desire, here represents adventure and the capsule of transformation. The apple is a figurative expression of the meaning of Underwater Love. Continuing, the paintings and graphics, which also do not explicitly depict the ocean, reveal their meaning simply by observing their details. The paintings are the threshold to another dimension where perception becomes porous. They function like caves, underwater cavities where moods, silences, and slow breathing echo. They are spaces where light filters as if underwater, where color shifts, fluctuates, and settles. The papers, on the other hand, include multiple overlapping languages: gesture, drawing, color, lines, and voids. Here, the work is constructed as a system of layers that influence each other, as on the seabed. The numerous depths represent different experiences. Finally, a large installation with satin ribbons envelops our passage. The concept for the work was conceived for the Paxos Biennial in 2022, reimagined for the Salone del Mobile 2025, and here it is recovered and reconfigured for an interior space with the aim of preserving the connection with its most intimate meaning: the movements of the oceanic posidonia. It is the morphology of this plant that, emulating the slow beat of the heart, represents the true lung of the sea, capable of generating up to twenty liters of oxygen per square meter per day. In the gallery spaces, the work breathes differently: architecture replaces the landscape of Paxos, but the invitation to stillness and listening remains. It speaks to the movement of the sea and the wind. More than simply looking, it asks us to reclaim a space for analysis, reflection, and calm. In this journey into the depths—toward what moves without haste and without noise—the work becomes a tool for experience. An action that broadens the meaning of art and reaffirms Robert Filliou’s quote: “Art is what makes life more interesting than art itself.”