The Centre Will Not Hold
Elinor Stanley & Amedeo Polazzo
FT2 Gallery, Milan
28 January – 7 March 2026
Curated by Maria Dolfini
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.”
[..]
-William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
F2T Gallery, Milan is pleased to present The Centre Will Not Hold, a two-person exhibition of London-based artists Amedeo Polazzo (b. 1988, Starnberg, Germany) and Elinor Stanley (b. 1992, London, UK), curated by Maria Dolfini. Taking its title from William Butler Yeats’s masterpiece The Second Coming – a poem that foresees the arrival of an unknown force, societal collapse and the decline of morality and order – the show brings the two artists into dialogue around gravity, suspension and atemporality.
What is it that holds us to the ground? What happens when normative spatial and temporal axes are disrupted? Paintings on canvas, fresco secco wall paintings and monotypes choreograph ideas of disorientation, ascent and collapse, engendering unfettered fields of vision. What emerges is a delicate architecture of imbalance—one that invites the viewer to relinquish certainty and encounter perception as something provisional, shifting and continuously reconfigured.
Polazzo and Stanley challenge our expectations of groundedness and invite a reckoning with entropy; rather than obeying the physical laws of gravity and perspective, their works gesture towards disobedience by drifting, floating, lurching and fragmenting the picture plane. Indeterminate pools of paint and abstract fields of colour give rise to bodies and objects that emerge without a clear direction or gravitational force, oscillating between wandering and being lost, comfort and displacement. Their work evokes a sense of weightlessness and disorientation, unmooring the subjects from fixed horizons and traditional vantage points and enabling them to be experienced from different directions.
Amedeo Polazzo’s surreal and whimsical paintings depict worlds made up of domestic moments and dreamlike memories. Floating fruits emerge from anonymous spaces and cut-out perspectives dominate his canvases; associating familiar elements in unobvious ways, he offers a gateway to the subconscious. The exhibition opens with an immersive fresco by Polazzo that adumbrates a gate-like portal. Devising trompe-l’œil, the work eschews the fixity of architecture and gives the illusion of spatial infinity, akin to being lost in Borges’s labyrinth. The fresco ushers to a large canvas, L’attesa, where vivid red apples fly and fall against an apocalyptic background. Next door, in L’ospite a perfectly halved, open apple jubilantly rises at the centre of the composition, pop in its colour and linear shape: an overtly sensual domestic symbol carrying biblical connotations of genesis and sin. A small larva inhabits the fruit’s core, later metamorphosing into nocturnal butterflies in the intimate, dormant, fairy-tale scene in Gli annunciatori between the windows.
In Elinor Stanley’s paintings and ink on paper, bodies float adrift in terrains of unfathomable depth. Simultaneously voluminous and liquid, overly direct yet coy, awkward yet tender, her nudes appear disproportionate and endlessly suspended. In her monumental painting That Ancient Night, This Recent Night, Stanley manipulates scale, perspective, force and speed; the composition is charged with currents of push and pull dominated by a cartoonish fist at the top—lifting skywards, floating, sinking and collapsing. Thing Music depicts a pregnant figure that is at once awakening and menacing. Illuminated by Turner-esque dawn light, the work nods to the iconography of Christian Annunciation, yet introduces a self-awareness and confrontational gaze foreign to this tradition, intensified by a high-pitched, luminous field of colour. Across these works, there is a dance between figures and positionality which leaves no space for traditional gravity, allowing emotional and corporeal manifestations to be experienced in their rawest form.
The Centre Will Not Hold brings together works by Amedeo Polazzo and Elinor Stanley that propose alternative ways of experiencing gravity, space and time. Their dialogue constructs an architecture of bodies and objects that is playful, drifting and untethered. Drawing from classical genres such as portraiture and the nude, both artists push against gravitational weight and inherited pictorial systems, reframing how images relate when orientation falters.
- Words by Maria Dolfini
Images: Photo by Dana Tescari. © the artist. Courtesy of F2T Gallery.