There is a thin threshold, often invisible, where the human dissolves into its opposite. It is not the realm of pure instinct, nor that of consciousness, but an in-between territory where the boundaries between control and surrender blur, and the body, stripped of identity, yields to a more fluid, animal, primitive form.

Gregorio Zanardi’s new collection emerges from this threshold. His works do not represent, describe, or narrate, they embody a tension. A constant fracture between the need to contain and the urge to let go. And it is precisely in this in-between that one of the most singular investigations in contemporary art takes shape: that of an artist who doesn’t try to humanize the animal, but rather to animalize the human.

What strikes the viewer immediately is the disarticulation of form. Bodies are never whole: they bend, merge, hide within other bodies. Human figures slump over the backs of elephants, curl under exaggerated plumage, nestle into the curve of a beak or the spine of a bull. There is no hierarchy here, neither the animal dominates nor the human asserts itself. What we witness is a dissonant coexistence, a surreal symbiosis hovering between a lucid dream and a degenerated children’s illustration.

Beneath the ironic, almost cartoonish surface lies a highly sophisticated visual mechanism. The chromatic choices, for instance, are never incidental: the flat, saturated backgrounds, bubblegum pink, blazing yellow, artificial blue, synthetic green, act as both anesthetic and emotional amplifier. Like in hyperrealism, the more artificial the setting, the more intense the central trauma becomes. And indeed, trauma is everywhere, though never stated, only suggested.

The animals’ faces are often vacant, apathetic, numb. Their mouths, clenched around lit cigarettes, become archetypes of existential boredom: smoking here is not about vice, but about pause, inertia, alienation. It’s the only visible action in otherwise static scenes. The entire collection is grounded in this paradox: instinct, which should be impulse and immediacy, is instead rendered contemplative, suspended. There are no leaps, claws, or bites. Just bodies that have stopped fighting, bodies that collapse. Animals that don’t flee, hunt, or chase, but receive, like cradles, these purposeless humans clinging to the idea of a return that never comes.

In this way, Zanardi inverts the entire romantic mythology of "returning to nature." There is no innocence in these images. No primordial purity to reclaim. What we find instead is a painful negotiation with what remains: flesh, fatigue, error. A body seeking shelter in another living being, as if identity could dissolve into a shared bestiality.

And yet, despite the surreal drift and grotesque hybridization, there is no violence here. These works don’t scream, they don’t wound. They murmur. They fade. They guide our gaze through a soft, melancholic regression, at times even tender. As if the desire to be “less human” were not a rejection, but an act of compassion toward oneself.

At the center of the entire collection is the body, in its most fragile and ambiguous form. Never glorified, never performative, never heroic. Zanardi’s body doesn’t expose itself, it recoils. It doesn’t conquer, it clings. It doesn’t possess, it begs to be held. It is a nest-body, a hidden-body, a body saturated with a time that no longer knows what to do with itself.

His influences, though present, one might think of Bacon’s torn flesh, George Condo’s melancholic grotesques, or Botero’s volumes mutated into distortion, are not used to define his work, but to understand how far it strays. Zanardi absorbs and transcends. He doesn’t quote, he metabolizes. His grammar is autonomous, brutal, precise.

And perhaps it is this very precision that makes his work so powerful: the sense that every deformation, every folded posture, every blank stare has been composed with surgical empathy. There is no cynicism here. Only the fatigue of the species, the weight of awareness, the dark humor of someone who’s seen too much, and has finally chosen to surrender.

In an age obsessed with performance, identity, and behavioral optimization, the most radical gesture may be the abandonment of the human form. Gregorio Zanardi does not offer escape, nor catharsis. He offers an alternative: the vision of a coexistence where human and animal are not enemies, nor metaphors, but bodies in search of stillness. And in that stillness, perhaps, a new kind of freedom can begin to grow.