From 3 to 9 October 2025, the spaces of C&C Milano will host Everything Is Waiting For You by Megan Reed, a new stage of the exhibition programme promoted by Nicoletta Rusconi Art Projects in collaboration with Cascina i.d.e.a.
In the heart of Brera, C&C Milano – a renowned showroom for textiles and interior design – will on this occasion open its doors to contemporary art, transforming itself into a meeting point between art, architecture and lifestyle.
The exhibition is the outcome of the artist-in-residence programme promoted once again this year by Cascina i.d.e.a., a platform that fosters dialogue between creativity, sustainability and community. All works on view are new and will be unveiled on Thursday 2 October at 5:00 pm, offering the public an opportunity to meet the artist, the curator and the project’s partners.
The show is accompanied by an original critical text written specifically for the occasion by curator Sabino Maria Frassà, which we are pleased to present here in preview.
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Megan Reed: Strategies of Freedom. Colour as Body, Stage, Resistance
Sabino Maria Frassà, curator
Sabino Maria Frassà together with Megan Reed
The “democracy” of colour and matter is the incandescent core of Megan Reed, the artist who has transformed chroma into a political language. In an age marked by the return of supremacist ideologies, her refusal of white is not a formal quirk but an ethical act. Each work becomes a visual manifesto of plurality and community.
Her sculptures, while denying both pure abstraction and conventional figuration, always retain an anthropomorphic nucleus: primordial, totemic bodies that return the physical and relational dimension of the human being. Here colour becomes flesh and stage, gesture and presence. In this sense, her forms converse with a genealogy that runs from the historical avant-gardes – from the encounter between European avant-gardes and African ritual sculptures, through Picasso and Brancusi’s archetypal forms – to Ugo Rondinone’s towering monochrome sculptures. Reed absorbs these references without imitating them, transforming them into her own language where colour is flesh and gesture, not decorative surface.
The bodies inhabiting her work, both in painting and in sculpture, are never isolated: they occupy space as fragments of a chorus. They surprise us because they are born from a hand capable of solitude, yet they offer themselves as a collective rite. Paintings and sculptures become the wings of an existential theatre in which we are all actors. This theatricality – an open yet binding stage – is her idea of democracy: a place where no colour, no form can claim to be the only one.
Her art thus gives shape to the unsayable, to what escapes ordinary language: intuitions, emotions, memories, fears and desires that can be seen, touched, traversed. “We are multitude,” Marinella Senatore would say, and the artist translates this plurality into visceral, primordial figures as if – and perhaps it is so – the hands arrive before the thought. It is not improvisation but a strategy of freedom, where study and constant experimentation make colour itself a body in tension towards freedom, capable of breaking free from the constraints of existence and transforming limits and contradictions into possibilities for relationship and awareness.
Their chromatic energy is a hymn to difference and echoes Bergman’s intuition that “beneath every mask there is another mask. And another. Until the naked face no one can see.” In this universe of masks and roles, Reed’s art becomes not only theatre but also resistance: her all-round plurality recalls that, as Édouard Glissant writes, “there is no identity that is not in relation,” and no colour, no form can claim to be the only one.
And yet, within this vibrant and irresistible explosion of colours in space, a vein of melancholy hides. No one is truly alone; and yet each of us performs – at least in part – the role society and our own historical time assign us. The artist’s figures thus seem immersed in a space conceived as a sum of canvases and sculptures: wings of a world of infinite immobilities that colour envelops all around. And perhaps that immobility is an anchoring: the search for a stable foundation in the instability of the real and of an existence that makes us nomadic bodies, always seeking fellow travellers as necessary as they are sometimes impossible.
Art thus becomes both play and travelling companion: the works transform relationship into body, stage and resistance, becoming real actions that affirm freedom without erasing the density of matter. The artistic gesture becomes a refuge for those who can be alone yet believe in community. In the plurality of worlds Reed creates, hopes for and narrates, she offers and finds comfort and consolation: a mirror for reflecting on a complex world marked by inequalities, where the ideal of colour is contradicted by discrimination against diversity. It is precisely in this gap that the strength of her work resides: transforming the “unsayable” into a gesture of freedom and resistance, an invitation to look at – and perhaps change – what we do not want or cannot say, but which today we can no longer remain silent about, at least through colour.
Everything Is Waiting For You
C&C Milano, Via Brera 7 — Milan
3–9 October 2025 | 10:00 am–6:00 pm
Opening: Thursday 2 October, 5:00 pm
For more information: federica@nicolettarusconi.com
Cover image: Violets, 2023, oil on canvas, 122×122 cm, Photo credit: Jeff McLane
