i shed myself like plaster from a roman wall,
né qui né là,
never fully here, never fully anywhere.

Penalty presents Nè qui, nè là, a new body of paintings by Mattea Perrotta shaped by movement, place, and identity. The title—neither here nor there—names a condition that surfaces in her writing and in the works themselves: a life redirected by shifting geographies and the interior adjustments those shifts demand. Erosion, breath, and residue set the register for the exhibition, and the artist takes up these themes through process and material.

The surfaces carry a muted emotional temperature—fields where forms edge toward recognition before dissolving back into matter. Color behaves like weather; weight gathers and thins; edges slip or collapse into mass. This sensibility grows from how the works are built: dense understructures of plaster, marble dust, beeswax, book pages, and cloth pressed, scraped, and sanded into a second skin. Charcoal enters wet ground, marks from her non-dominant hand loosen the surface’s architecture, and oilstick seals areas resistant to further excavation. Each painting records abrasion and repair, seams opened and re-sealed, wiped passages, faint geometries emerging as if from sediment. Perrotta returns, erases, and returns again, treating the canvas as a site to be uncovered.

Dream House (2025) makes this excavation visible: red, violet, grey, and deep green interrupted by a vertical column of plaster and textile pressed outward from within. The seam reads as hinge, scar, or remnant—structural, shed, or half-remembered. Under the Arch of Santorio (2025) takes a quieter turn: muted greens and umbers hold the ghost of an arch-like form, softened by abrasion. The surface behaves like a weathered interior, a threshold glimpsed rather than entered. Together, these works anchor the exhibition’s architecture of memory and show how Perrotta’s images arrive through material pressure rather than depiction.

home is an idea, not an address.
i found home in the in-between,
because i had no choice.

Her movement between cities over the last several years shapes the tenor of the exhibition. Rome’s dust and warmth recur as muted ochres and veiled blacks; deep Naples yellow carries what she calls “the warmest I have ever been.” The works register place as an accumulation of what settles and what remains suspended, echoing the artist’s line: “my home is layered, eroded, veiled, always revealing, always hiding.” These are not landscapes, portraits, or abstractions in the conventional sense; they function instead as sites—compact architectural containers of memory where material, time, and breath gather. Despite their narrative-leaning titles—Dream House, The Blanket, A Window Near the House, In Bed—the paintings resist depiction. The titles operate as thresholds: cues toward environments whose architectures have eroded.

Perrotta’s small-scale works in Nè qui, nè là carry a surprising density. Their compression sharpens the encounter: gestures fold tightly together, surfaces break and re-form, and each panel behaves like a fragment lifted from a larger, unseen structure. Perrotta describes this as wondering “If I was a painting, what would that feel like?”—a question the works answer through their shifting sense of skin, architecture, and interior space.

Rather than offering resolution, Nè qui, nè là holds states in transition. The works carry these movements while holding place as a set of inherited conditions rather than scenery, looking to traces shaped by past and present pressures that extend beyond the individual. What remains is an image shaped by movement and residue: a place where the slow work of uncovering builds its own coherence.