Whenever artists dare not to banish the supposed contingency of everyday life but, with almost manic precision, translate it into images, objects, and spaces, that precious implosion we call art occurs. Serena Ferrario takes exactly this risk. Her first solo exhibition at HELDENREIZER Contemporary, It’s not just the others, is no decorative promenade; it is an existential laboratory, a kaleidoscope of our splintered present.

 

Ferrario situates us in the lineage of the great narrative dismantlers—from Goya’s Desastres to Picasso’s Guernica—while evoking the “mental theatres” of Mike Kelley. Her figures appear like fragile demons, hungry for meaning, closeness, and redemption. They are, to borrow Jean Genet’s phrase, “sacred monsters”: half-victim, half-indictment.

 

For Ferrario, drawing is no gentle prelude but the score itself. Lines proliferate, leap off the paper, colonize walls, floors—even the atmosphere of the room. Within these hypertrophic networks, melancholy and satire, intimacy and grotesque circulate—quivering coordinates of a conditio humana that expands Sartre’s dictum “Hell is other people.” Hell, Ferrario insists, is also carried within, and only those who embrace their own “hungry ghosts” can break the spell.

 

The installation is conceived musically: like a symphony, voices confront one another, interlace, and fade. Life-size cut-outs, filmic fragments, crumpled drawing-bodies oscillate between stage set and testimony, confession and collective fable. This art does not comfort; it challenges viewers to leave their narrative comfort zone, to integrate contradiction, to realize that identity is neither monolithic nor final but always a contested territory.

 

Thus It’s not just the others offers poetic proof that art—taken seriously—remains a space where inner and outer spectres are not suppressed but questioned. And perhaps, just perhaps, such questioning might spark the freedom we need more urgently than ever.

 

Born in 1986 in Crema, Lombardy, and trained in Braunschweig under Wolfgang Ellenrieder, Hartmut Neumann, Ciprian Mureșan, and Isa Melsheimer, Serena Alma Ferrario has absorbed the technical precision that allows her imagery to fray so freely. A diploma with distinction (2016) was followed by master-student honors (2017) and a succession of awards—from the Max Ernst Scholarship (Brühl) and the Master-Student Prize of the Stiftung Braunschweigischer Kulturbesitz to a Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship and, in 2021, the unanimously conferred Horst-Janssen Graphic Art Prize. Her works have entered notable collections: Hamburger Kunsthalle, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Haus des Papiers Berlin, and—as a permanent installation—the town hall of Brühl.

 

Ferrario operates as an eminent draughtswoman of ambivalence. From tentative sketches she spins serial webs in which figures migrate from sheet to sheet, cut-out to wall drawing. Color is almost banished; black, white, and vibrating greys supply the material for an analytical ballet of line. Repeatedly the line abandons its two-dimensional pen, expanding as silkscreen, photocopy, or vacuum-formed plastic element to absorb the room. In parallel, films emerge from self-shot footage, found material, news clippings, and drawings—surreal flips in which real, imagined, and remembered become indistinguishable.

 

Since 2016, Ferrario’s biographical tensions—Romanian mother, Italian father, lived migration—have come to the fore. Describing herself as a “Third Culture Adult Kid,” she transforms the internal fissures of origin into a third, artistic culture in which the irreconcilable may dwell. That is the point: in It’s not only the others Ferrario shows that the fragment is not a deficiency but a potential—a site where identity, history, and ghosts of the past can be renegotiated beyond national or narrative fixity.