MILAN, 22 MARCH 2026
by Enrico De Santis
The Eternal Return of the Future
Time and Existence – The Eternity of Moments contains many symbols, yet only one true protagonist: Time. This oil on canvas by Angelo Asaro, exhibited at the Milan Biennale 2026, draws inspiration from Surrealism, employing a simple visual language in the service of complex meanings. The symbols in the work do not conceal themselves; rather, they present themselves openly in order to reveal what cannot be seen: the unstoppable flow of moments.
The painting arrests time within its central symbol—an hourglass—which may be turned to make the future become the present, or to bring the past back again. The work is palindromic even in the actions of its figures. The man, like a modern Prometheus, may descend the ladder after stealing the secret of time. Or he may ascend it, carrying a volume of memories in an attempt to halt the relentless passage of instants. This is an hourglass aware of its own duration—whether it might last as long as a centenarian’s life or as briefly as that of a dog—and it reveals itself only halfway. The upper bulb lies beyond the canvas, visible only through suggestion. Just like the future, which does not yet exist… yet we are free to imagine it.
The sand, a symbol of matter transforming over time and thereby measuring it, is transfigured into other signs. At the top of the ladder we find a series of volumes resembling books, yet on their spines one clearly reads the word photo. These are not collections of imagined images, but photographs—visible memories of something that truly occurred, surfaces upon which time has come to a standstill. These volumes assert a shift in the relationship between word and image. Communication—first through photography and television, and now through social media and the web—is returning to the dominance of visual language. It is an inversion of the hourglass, a journey into the past, toward the birth of emoticons, the earliest forms of ideographic writing, or even further back, to a time when visual communication was the only possible form.
Yet something exists beyond time. A volume serves as the base of the hourglass: a real book that remains unchanged regardless of the hourglass’s eternal turning. A book that embodies the capacity to imagine, and to think even of what cannot be seen. This time, the spine reads The Old Man and the Sea, a novel that teaches perseverance—that value is not measured by the results achieved, but by the manner in which they are pursued. Even regardless of achieving them—and regardless… of time.