«Is it possible to recognize spaces of rebirth and regeneration in the spontaneity of an unwanted and wild nature? The Croatian artist Igor Eškinja investigates the relationship between man and nature, studying the plant presence that grows in abandoned industrial spaces and forgotten or in completely urbanized areas. The plants that grow there – mainly weeds very different from those present in the woods or from the ornamental ones of city gardens – become the subject and symbol of a nature that reconquers human space, becoming a metaphor for an urban, social and identity transformation. The artist translates the investigation into these “weeds” into poetic wallpapers that transport us to gardens where memory, redemption, the struggle for survival, affirmation of life and beauty coexist. If in the Christian tradition the goal of the believer’s hope is in Celestial Jerusalema wonderful garden-city, in which to find peace and harmony between God, man and cosmos, Igor Eškinja leads us back to gardens in which reconciliation is recreated starting from what was despised and rejected”, Andrea Dall’Asta SJ.

Inside the exhibition “The dreams of Creation”, which can be visited at the San Fedele Gallery in Milan until 10 January 2026, there are large immersive installations made of wallpaper, such as Untitled (Via dell’Industria) And Untitled (Braidica); followed by poetic cards exposed to the sun, taken from the series Diagrams of accumulation and large aquatic surfaces printed on plexiglass, such as Surfaces, which return to the viewer some works of an ephemeral nature as they were originally made in ash.

The works on display trace a symbolic path in the spaces of the Gallery which reaches the interior of the San Fedele Museum thanks to the presence of some works taken from the photographic series Golden fingers of Louvre. They are fingerprints that numerous people have left on the glass of the exit door of the famous Parisian museum. It is a simple daily gesture that accumulates one on top of the other from day to day, captured by the artist at the moment in which the golden light of the sun transfigures it. The trace of an imprint rises to “glory”.

Igor Eškina (born 1975, lives and works in Rijeka). Through his research Eškinja defines some characteristics that go beyond the physical aspects of the work, thus entering the registers of the imaginary and the imperceptible. In 2008 he exhibited at the Rovereto venues of Manifesta 7 and held a solo exhibition at the Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos. He has held numerous solo and group exhibitions in Croatia, Spain, Venezuela and Austria, as well as in Italy.

Carlo Franza