“Man is the being who has made nothingness his dwelling.”
— Emil Cioran
In the abandoned belly of the former Magazzini Raccordati, beneath Milan’s Central Station, Gian Maria Tosatti gives form to a void that becomes a path: Paradiso. Not a work to contemplate, but a threshold to cross — a limit-experience that interrogates being, unsettles, disorients. Over 3,000 square meters unfolds a restless labyrinth, a desecrated altar of the celestial imaginary, where art sheds its decorative role and becomes the raw flesh of time.
On the walls, the verses of the Apocalypse no longer speak of a promised future, but echo as a diagnosis of the end. And beneath our feet, footsteps on salt become the sound of the abyss — a fragile sound slipping into the silence of all that has been lost. Paradiso is not an elsewhere, but the distorted mirror of a collapsed present.
“Today, as ethical principles have been lost and morality has become an obstacle, what kind of paradise do we imagine?”, the artist asks. “It is a destroyed place, collapsed upon itself, without angels. Empty, yet filled with human violence.”
In this installation, every idea of transcendence appears hollowed out, as though heaven itself had abdicated. The celestial vaults crumble, eaten away by dampness and oblivion; the halls where angelic hierarchies once dwelled are now inhabited by human remnants — bodies wrapped in thermal blankets, marginal and real presences.
The visitor walks through spaces where matter bears the traces of an invisible, almost systemic violence. Stagnant puddles, crumbling latrines, piles of snow and salt on the verge of melting: the scene seems composed of what remains after an undeclared shipwreck.
“Paradise is the last frontier of human hope,” says Tosatti, “but for a civilization growing ever more desperate, what form does paradise take? Of course, it takes the form of something falling apart — and so we enter this disarmed paradise and realize that yes, deep in our hearts, this is the last frontier of hope: a void.”
The void we encounter is not merely a weariness of the soul, but the effect of a force that preceded and overwhelmed us.
“Then we realize that this void didn’t simply wither because we lost hope, but perhaps there is a violence behind all this — a coercive violence that is part of a society which has stolen hope from us. They didn’t fade from our hearts — someone took them away, because governing hopeless people is much easier.”
And so the vision radicalizes: destruction is no longer an endpoint, but the very condition of the visible. On one wall, the names of angels — once etched in marble — now lie shattered. In the final room, an underground railway line appears as the bare trace of a memory too heavy to ignore. A railway that vanishes into the night to the sound of El Mole Rahamim, leading — both symbolically and historically — to the concentration camps, to the place where humanity unraveled itself.
“I hope these will be my last ‘dark’ works,” Tosatti confides, hinting at a possible turn. Yet as long as art reflects the substance of our time, it cannot help but return this vertigo: an emptied sky, a disarmed faith, a humanity suspended between loss and longing — an eternal warning, an icon of a species that has betrayed itself.
Thank you, Gian Maria Tosatti.
“Wounded beauty generates vision. Art is the luminous scar of time.”
— Jean-Luc Nancy
