You have always held more than one role within the art world. You then founded an art rental company — a model that barely existed in Italy — Artuarte Contemporanea. How do these different identities coexist? Do they nourish one another, or do they sometimes, inevitably, get in each other’s way?

My identities have never stopped talking to one another. The artist taught me to look at works with eyes that go beyond the surface; the gallerist gave me the ability to recognise the talent of others without envy; the entrepreneur forced me to translate beauty into something concrete, accessible and sustainable over time. Artuarte Contemporanea was not born despite these other identities — it was born thanks to all three together.

Of course, there are moments of tension. The artist would like more time for himself, for his own studio, for research. The entrepreneur replies that there is a project to carry forward, artists to support, a network to keep alive. But in the end I understood that this tension is not an obstacle — it is the engine. It is precisely from the effort of holding these different souls together that something original is born. Art rental as I conceived it did not exist in Italy — one euro a day, for anyone, anywhere — because imagining it required someone who was simultaneously inside art and outside it. Inside in order to understand it; outside in order to see it through the eyes of those who do not live with it every day.

Tell us something about your beginnings. Rome, the San Lorenzo School, the early years in the art world: how does one “discover” that one is an artist? And among your references, who has carried the greatest weight?

Rome gets inside you without asking permission. You grow up having already seen more art than you can process — in museums, churches, on the streets, on the façades of buildings. It is not a privilege you recognise immediately: you understand it later, when you leave the city and realise that not everyone has had that fortune.

The San Lorenzo School was for me something more than an artistic community. It was a living laboratory, a place where art was debated, argued over, experimented with every day. There I met Piero Pizzicanella and Nunzio, Claudio Abate, and through them I understood something fundamental: being an artist is not a declaration, it is a daily practice. You do not “discover” it at a precise moment — you simply stop pretending you are not one.

Among my references, the greatest weight has been Warhol’s — and not only for stylistic reasons. He taught me that art can, and perhaps must, engage with the real world, with products, with ordinary people, with mass communication. That the boundary between art and life is a convention, not a law. That lesson has stayed with me for thirty years and continues to guide me today, in everything I do.

What did you learn about collectors, businesses and the non-specialist public during those years, and how did it influence your subsequent choices, including your entrepreneurial ones?

I learned that the distance between art and people is not a question of culture or intelligence — it is a question of access. The collector walks into a gallery because he already knows it is his world. The businessman walks in if someone accompanies him, if he understands that there is value there beyond the aesthetic. The general public, on the other hand, often does not walk in at all — not because they are uninterested, but because no one has ever told them they could, that it was their home too.

This realisation changed everything in the way I work. I understood that the problem was not art — it was the system surrounding it: too closed, too self-referential, too convinced that it needed to select its audience rather than broaden it. When I conceived the rental model, I was responding to precisely this: how can a beautiful work reach a place where people pass through every day, without them having to buy anything, without them having to know anything about art history?

The restaurateur who rents a painting for his premises does not think of himself as a collector. But his customers, that evening at dinner, are looking at an original work. And something — even without their knowing it — remains. This is the most important thing I learned: art acts even in silence, even on the inattentive, even on those who did not seek it out.

You devoted yourself for a long time, and with great success, to Artuarte Contemporanea. Why do you choose today, of all times, to return to dedicating time to other artists?

There are things you never truly finish — you set them aside, you let them rest, but they keep working inside you even when you are not tending to them. The gallery has always been one of those things. I did not abandon it: I suspended it, with the silent promise of returning when I was ready.

Twenty years of Artuarte gave me something I could not have obtained any other way: I saw art from every possible angle. I saw it in offices and hotels, in restaurants and banks and private homes. I watched how those who do not know it react, how a space changes when a work enters it, how a person changes. I built a collection that is also a map of contemporary thought. I supported around two hundred artists, some of whom today have significant careers.

Today I feel that this journey has given me back something essential: the maturity to run the gallery in the way I always wanted to run it from the start. Not with the slightly naive enthusiasm of the early years, but with the awareness of someone who knows what he wants to show, why, and to whom. The right moment is not the one when you are ready — it is the one when you can no longer wait. And that moment is now.

The Massimo Lupoli Gallery is located in Nepi, in an industrial warehouse in Tuscia. What motivated this choice over a central location in Rome?

Rome gives you everything, but demands everything in return. It demands impossible rents, complicated logistics, constant competition for attention in a city where something happens every day. And above all it demands that you be a certain type of gallery — the one in the historic centre, in the right neighbourhood, with the mondaine vernissage. I wanted to be something else.

Nepi is a deliberate choice, not a consolation prize. Tuscia is an extraordinary territory, rich in history, beauty and a nature that still speaks. An industrial warehouse in this context might seem a paradox, but it is exactly the paradox I was looking for. Just as Warhol’s Factory was in a Manhattan warehouse, just as the great international contemporary art spaces are so often former factories and former depots — places that had another life before becoming art.

There is also something symbolic in the fact that the street is called Via dell’Industria. The art I make has always had an industrial component — in the noble sense of the word: that of doing, producing, putting one’s hands into the work every day. And then, when you think about it, being outside Rome means that those who come to me have chosen to come. They have not passed by chance. It is a natural selection that produces a more attentive, more curious, more willing-to-listen audience.

Have you ever considered long-term projects to diversify your gallery’s role in the territory? Artist residencies — you did a great deal for young artists in the past — local collaborations, new ways of involving young audiences and drawing them closer to contemporary art?

I have not only thought about it — it is an integral part of the vision with which I reopened. A gallery in 2026 that limits itself to exhibiting and selling is half a gallery. The territory in which you are rooted asks more of you, the young artists ask more of you, and the young public — those who do not yet know they love art — asks more of you.

Artist residencies are something I feel deeply as my own. I have always believed that the most precious moment in an artist’s life is not the exhibition, but what comes before it: the process, the research, the mistake, the discovery. Bringing artists to live and work in this territory, to breathe Tuscia, to engage with a space so different from the cities they are used to moving in — this produces works that could not have been born anywhere else.

For young people I have a clear idea: they do not want to be educated in art, they want to be surprised by it. So no top-down instruction, no academic explanations. I want events that mix languages — music, photography, performance, video — because contemporary art is already contamination, and young people know this better than anyone. The gallery must become a place you can walk into without knowing what you will find. And leave different from how you arrived.

Your relationship with art criticism. In one of the most recent press releases for a recent exhibition of yours — the first, if I understand correctly, with which you resumed the activity of the Massimo Lupoli Gallery, inaugurated at the end of April — there is a quotation from Achille Bonito Oliva. What is your relationship with him, and more broadly with that generation of critics?

Achille Bonito Oliva is far more than a critic — he is a builder of meaning. He possessed the rare capacity not merely to interpret the art of his time, but to orientate it, to give it a theoretical direction without making it rigid. The Transavanguardia was not simply a movement: it was a declaration of freedom, the permission to return to painting at a moment when everything was pushing towards conceptual abstraction. That lesson has always stayed with me.

I met him for the first time in the 1980s, when he was already a genuine star of the art world and I was taking my very first steps. It was made possible by Cleto Polcina, who was a mentor to me in the fullest sense of the word. His gallery in Piazza Mignanelli was an extraordinary place, a crossroads of intelligence and talent, and Cleto had a special relationship with Achille — professional and one of deep friendship simultaneously. To be there, very young, listening to those conversations, was an education that no school could have given me.

There is also another name that is woven through all of this in a very personal way for me: Giancarlino Benedetti Corcos. With him I have a friendship of thirty-five years and a working relationship I would describe as ancestral — in the sense that it comes from far back, that it has deep roots, that it has no need of explanation because it simply exists. Achille Bonito Oliva has written extensively about Giancarlino over the years, and in a certain sense it is he who is the invisible thread that has always connected us, even in periods when we are not in frequent contact. Certain connections have no need of presence to remain alive.

Quoting Achille Bonito Oliva in a press release was not a rhetorical tribute. It was a deliberate choice: I wanted it to be clear from the outset that this gallery is situated within a serious cultural tradition, one that has roots, that knows its own history. One can be contemporary and innovative only if one knows where one comes from. For me, he is part of that ‘where from’.

Art is also a market. How do you see the art market in Italy in 2026 for an independent gallery such as yours, and more generally?

The Italian art market is a complicated patient — it has moments of great vitality and moments of inexplicable immobility. In 2026 we are in a transitional phase that can be frightening, or can be read as an opportunity, depending on the angle from which you look at it.

The major international fairs, the mega-galleries with branches across the world, the digital and online auction market have redrawn the rules of the game. An independent gallery, in this scenario, cannot compete on that terrain, and it would be wrong to try. It must find its own terrain, made up of authentic relationships, courageous curatorial choices, a direct and honest engagement with artists and collectors.

What I see, and what gives me confidence, is a growing weariness with art as pure financial investment — with the work acquired because it rises in value rather than because it moves you. There is a generation of new collectors — younger, more curious, less interested in prestige and more interested in meaning — who are looking for galleries like mine: small, independent, with a clear and non-negotiable vision.

In Italy we have a structural problem: there is no serious cultural policy to support the contemporary art market, there are no tax incentives for collectors, there is no widespread culture of purchasing. But it is precisely for this reason that there is still so much room for those with the courage to work with method and passion. The market gives you nothing for free — but it does not take away your ability to build something lasting, if you know what you want.

What is it, in your view, that transforms a physical gallery into a “necessary” place for art today, in a world where the virtual is gaining the upper hand?

The virtual has done something important: it has democratised visibility. Today an artist working in Nepi can be seen in Tokyo; a collector in Seoul can discover a Roman gallery with a single click. This is a real value that there is no point in denying or fighting.

But there is one thing the virtual will never be able to do — and I say this with the certainty of someone who has spent thirty years observing how people react in front of works: it cannot restore the physical presence of art. A work of art in real space occupies air, casts light, has a scale and a visual weight that no screen, however sophisticated, can translate. Standing before a large-format Baselitz or Kiefer, or a Kounellis installation, is a bodily experience before it is an intellectual one. The body receives it before the mind does.

So the physical gallery does not become necessary in spite of the virtual — it becomes necessary because of the virtual. The more the world shifts online, the rarer, more precious and irreplaceable the moment of real encounter with the work becomes. The gallery becomes the place one goes to remember what it feels like to stand before something real.

I believe that in the coming years we will witness a profound rediscovery of the physical spaces of art, just as we are witnessing the rediscovery of paper books, vinyl records and local markets. There is a growing need for tangible reality in a world that is dematerialising. And the gallery, if it truly knows how to be a living place rather than a mere container, can respond to that need in a unique way.

Does Massimo Lupoli still devote time to his own art? If so, how?

I never stopped, even in the moments when I seemed completely absorbed by the business. The studio has always been the place I returned to when everything else became too noisy. It is the place where I do not have to explain anything to anyone, where time works differently, where I can afford to make mistakes without consequences.

That said, my relationship with painting has changed over the years. As a young man I painted with a certain urgency, almost a need to prove something to myself before anyone else. Today there is more silence in my work. More space between one gesture and the next. Twenty years in contact with works by Cattelan, Abramović, Kapoor and Kounellis changes your gaze irreversibly — you cannot pretend not to have seen what you have seen.

The Brushes series continues to be my most personal territory. That mechanism of subtracting colour instead of adding it, of illuminating through absence — I feel it still has much to say to me. I have not exhausted that research; on the contrary, with time it has deepened, become more essential, less decorative.

I devote time to my art in the spaces between, yes — but they are spaces I protect carefully. Because I know that without that, everything else — the gallery, the artists, the projects — would lose its root. A gallerist who no longer has a living relationship with creation risks becoming an administrator. And I have no wish to be an administrator.

A watchword of our times: contamination. How do you interpret it in your multifaceted work in service of art — your own and that of others?

Contamination is the word that best describes not only my work but my very biography. I have been an artist and an entrepreneur, a gallerist and a collector, a promoter and a patron. I have brought art into industrial warehouses and suburban restaurants, I have brought together established artists and unknown young ones, I have set the critical tradition of Achille Bonito Oliva in dialogue with the needs of a hotelier who wants to beautify his lobby. My entire professional life is a continuous contamination.

But there is a superficial way of understanding this word and a profound one. The superficial way is to mix everything with everything, without criterion, chasing novelty for novelty’s sake. The profound way is to bring different worlds into encounter while maintaining respect for each of them — so that none loses its identity in the meeting, but all emerge from it transformed.

In my gallery this means bringing together artists who would never have sought each other out, creating dialogues between works that speak different languages, inviting publics who do not normally cross paths. It means bringing to Nepi, to a warehouse in Tuscia, the same level of critical thought you would find in a gallery in Mayfair or Chelsea.

Warhol said that business is the most fascinating art form. I would add that contamination is its most honest method. Because it recognises that no language is complete on its own, that beauty is always born from an encounter, that true art is not afraid to get its hands dirty with the real world. I never have been.