Prato, houses, hills is a landscape built through the skilful use of color arranged with small and calibrated brushstrokes vertically, as if to compose the tiles of a mosaic. This way of proceeding is typical of the works of 1966 and denotes the intention to avoid any impressionistic approximation by entrusting the image with a structure. In this lucid rationality of the system, the emotion is not stopped, but is expressed. The painter needs to let the image settle in order to set it clearly with a dominated formal and constructive elaboration. The landscape is constructed, like other paintings of this period, according to a horizontal trend, along abstract polychrome bands. Color is the protagonist of the work, but as Guido Ballo maintains, "color, in Zanella, is never sensual: it is as if filtered by the intellect." Green predominates in all its variations and shades, interspersed with spots of browns, reds, purples and blues. There is no separation between the sky, the earth, the houses, but everything is permeated in a single light that softens the whole landscape; the colors vibrate one in the reflection of the other creating a sense of lively harmony. Zanella turns his attention to the world illuminated by light and with color and its vibrations it makes the atmosphere and the light itself of the air, dissolving the consistency of objects and the outlines of things, the landscape becomes thus a single flow of light and color, the true essence of reality. The chromatic orchestration follows only internal rhythms, dissolving in them the suggestion of the natural impression. The painting is characterized by an abstract and informal language reentering in Lombard naturalism with accents of esp abstract ressionism. In addition to being a painter, Silvio Zanella was one of the founders of the Gallarate Prize in 1949 and the founder and first director of the Civic Gallery of Modern Art in Gallarate from 1966 to 1998.

A landscape from afar is the installation that Massimo Bartolini presented at the MAGA museum as part of the "Twister. Lombardy Museum Network for Contemporary Art ". The 2009 project, which involved the main museums of Lombardy, had the dual objective of increasing their collections through the acquisition of a work and promoting a site-specific intervention that would permanently modify the surrounding places. museums. This was also the case for Bartolini's work, who worked on the threshold and the boundary between public space and museum space, a place which in turn is, by its nature, both public and private. Always interested in modifying the place where he works or rebuilding it, Bartolini intervenes - as Laura Cherubini affirms - “concealing and sublimating the efforts of planning and preparation”. In fact, in the face of an often complex study that comes to interest different disciplinary fields, his artistic interventions often translate into extremely light and delicate objects. His installations become places of contemplation, suspension, passage and revelation. A landscape from afar blends into the environment: the extended rods of the gate, a simple but very effective solution, recall the poplar woods of the plains, evanescent because they are shrouded in fog, with the contours that blend with the sky and the ground like the figure of the axis mundi. The relational modality that Bartolini triggers is multiple: he explores the territories and leaves a very light mark that connects heaven and earth, different spaces, man and landscape, as the artist himself states when speaking of the genesis of the work: "I was interested in landscape relations, consequently also the public, even the people, are landscape ”.

Composition by Enrico Prampolini is a particularly significant painting, useful for describing the path of the Modenese artist and documenting the cultural environment (that of Milan after World War II) in which the work was born. In fact, the painting, as an abstract-concrete composition, expresses a series of values linked to chromatic and formal relationships, broken by the insistence of a more fluid and dynamic sign element. The work, as Gillo Dorfles himself wrote on the occasion of the VI Quadrennial in Rome in 1955, "therefore seeks changing and varied forms but in continuous and progressive metamorphosis, on the one hand; on the other hand, the search for a realization of timbral values through the study and use of appropriate pictorial materials ". Prampolini's painting, in this phase of his activity, is linked to the abstract formulations expressed since the thirties by groups such as "Cercle et Carré" and the more important "Abstraction Création" to which the artist himself adhered since 1930. then, recovering the researches prior to the war years, he comes into contact with the Milanese concrete environment, reaching the point of joining the MAC. Prampolini's work, however, has its roots in previous decades, having frequented the Roman futurist environment since 1913. The painter is then fundamental for the theorization, after the First World War, of the Second Futurism through the publication of several posters, among which we recall The futurist scenic atmosphere (1924) in relation to the prolific activity of set designer that the artist constantly developed throughout his life. Dancer in movement, a work of 1935, on loan at the museum within the Ferrazzi Collection is also linked to the Second Futurism.

The brothers Joe and Gianni Colombo are among the creatives to whom we owe most of the all-Italian development of thinking about space and its vital functions. Throughout their activity, and definitively in the period of the industrial boom of the sixties, Joe thought of a design that will revolutionize the thought of form applied to living worldwide, while Gianni questioned the implications that the ability to feel and see they have with the psychic life of man; a research conducted not on the inexact path of feelings and narratives, but on that of the mechanics of perceptions, of how they, tested by particular conditions of space and light, trigger particular and revealing intellectual and emotional responses. Thus Gianni Colombo will dedicate a large part of his production to the creation of environments in which to test oneself by altering our perception of horizontality or verticality, simple data of our perceptive balance: "It is a bit of a representation, of a staging of ourselves that we make our perceptual state act as the very subject of the work ”, is the artist's suggestion. So, go inside and move forward, inside the cube traced by the light. Try to stop by measuring the space around you with your eyes. When you are perfectly immersed in the dark, your gaze relies on the only visible references, but they fluctuate. Check in the dark where the walls are. What is your mind processing gradually? The work is made up of very few elements, light or its absence, orthogonal lines. The experience in progress, in our way of psychically processing it, and our behavior are the true subject of the work. The space was reconstructed using the original engine of the work, assembled by the artist himself in 1976 at the historic site of the museum. The first of these spaces was built in 1967, in Graz, which is why the work bears a complex date: the first belongs to the project, the second to its realization.