Shanti Town

Naked Lunch Money is the third and last catalogue among those designed in 2019 for the exhibitions curated by UNA for Milan’s Spazio Leonardo and it reproduces the artworks from the series Shanti Town of artist Stefano Serretta.

Started in 2006 and still ongoing, Shanti Town is a graphic inventory of colossal architectures—from Baku to Kuala Lumpur, from London to Dubai—that were conceived to be symbols of the finance’s power but that instead, since unbuilt or demolished, became an expression of the contradictions of finance capitalism itself.

Serretta traced visually light silhouettes made of the continuous repetition of the hand-written sentence “too big to fail”—that spread contemporary to the financial crisis of subprime mortgages—which perfectly fits the architectural topos of the skyscraper.

Not only the artworks themselves but the choice of exhibiting them at Spazio Leonardo—an insurance company part of the Generali Group, which is based in Milan’s epicentre of the interactions between real estate and finance—produces a challenging criticism of capitalism’s fragile self-celebrating foundations.

The Layout

The layout has been entirely structured on a typographic modular grid with an height of 65 lines of text, that has been conceived to be used for all of Spazio Leonardo’s catalogues that were designed in 2019.

The grid is made of a two-level matrix allowing to double the modules from 55 to 110 in case of need, thus providing flexibility to the composition of the contents and variety to the layout articulation.

Reproductions of the artworks are all aligned at the centre of the page—set side by side, two by two, on each page—while captions and page numbers alternate symmetrically at the bottom of the double page.

The Sequence

The twenty-eight artworks exhibited in the show have been perfectly aligned according to a linear sequence, evoking a disciplined horizontal skyline that invites the public for a walk punctuated by a constant rhythm.

This linear sequence that characterises not only the display of the artworks but the visual experience which follows, also characterises the catalogue itself, since images have been arranged in the same way and order of that of the exhibition.

The entire catalogue has been conceived in order to reflect and enhance the work of the artist, whose drawings are the result of a methodological rigour and conceptual discipline which translate into a measured and essential aesthetic.

The Cover

The inside of the cover is dressed with an endless pattern made of the hand-written sentence “too big to fail”, a magnified detail from the artworks, inverted in colours and printed as a negative.

The inside, black and completely written, contrasts with an almost immaculate white cover featuring only the name of artist and the title of the exhibition—respectively aligned from the left and right margins.

In this way, three contrasts are generated—a chromatic one between white and black, a compositional one between empty and full, and a graphic one between typography and handwriting—subtly evoking the contrast between economic reality and financial abstraction that is reflected by the work of the artist.

Aesthetic Discipline

Through an essential graphic layout—which is aesthetically constrained and disciplined as the artworks reproduced on the pages—the catalogue reveals itself to be faithful and consistent with the work of Serretta and the exhibition itself.

—Nicola-Matteo Munari