3x3 Nine works on canvas

Elvira Amor, Marco Emmanuele, Claudio Verna

Opening 25 June, h 17 - 21

25 June – 19 September 2026

LABS Contemporary Art presents “3 X 3 — Nine Works on Canvas”, a dialogue between the practices of Elvira Amor, Marco Emmanuele and Claudio Verna, featuring a selection of three works by each artist.

Though belonging to different generations and artistic trajectories, the three artists share a profound engagement with the language of painting through color, gesture, material, and spatial construction. The exhibition unfolds as a dialogue between distinct visual approaches, each rooted in a highly personal investigation of the canvas surface.

Elvira Amor (1982, Madrid, ES) approaches painting as an instinctive and physical act. Gesture and color merge into dynamic compositions that expand beyond the boundaries of the canvas, transforming painting into an immersive and emotional field. Her practice reflects an immediate relationship between body, movement, and image, where form emerges through energetic layers of brushwork and saturated tones.

With a background in engineering, Marco Emmanuele (1986, Catania, IT) explores the expressive possibilities of industrial materials through a refined and poetic visual language. In recent years, Emmanuele has experimented with unconventional pigments and materials, including glass fragments collected from beaches to create delicate pastel surfaces reminiscent of fresco and mosaic techniques. His works move between abstraction and narration, where matter becomes both image and memory.

For Claudio Verna (1937, Guardiagrele, IT), color is never merely decorative: it becomes structure, rhythm, and tension. Verna developed a rigorous and coherent pictorial language in which chromatic vibration and geometric balance coexist in a state of continuous dynamism. His works reveal painting as both intellectual construction and sensorial experience. On view is “Doppio Arancio”, part of a rare cycle of works created specifically for the 1970 Venice Biennale, where part of the series was exhibited, marking a significant moment in the development of the artist’s chromatic and formal research.

Together, these nine works offer three distinct visions of contemporary painting, highlighting the enduring vitality of the medium across generations and artistic perspectives.