Santi is pleased to participate in Minor Attractions 2025 with a presentation of new works by Edoardo Rito, following the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in March 2025.

The six works presented in Room 11 extend Rito’s investigation into the afterlives of urban matter and the potential of modest materials to generate new sculptural languages. Continuing the trajectory of his Silt Units, a series initiated in early 2025, Rito engages in an almost archaeological practice: excavating wood fragments, metal offcuts, stones, and incidental objects from the street, which he then reconfigures with studio materials onto constructed supports.

With the new vertical Untitled series, Rito advances this exploration by working on salvaged wood supports, whose surfaces are treated with steel wool and a distilled vinegar solution. This chemical intervention produces shifting patinas, embedding processes of corrosion and transformation into the work itself. A development in this series is the introduction of small metal balls, discreetly affixed to the surface. Unlike the incidental fragments of the Silt Units, these elements operate less as debris and more as tactile markers, reminiscent of door handles, cabinet pulls, or other points of bodily engagement in domestic and architectural settings.

The Cabinets mark a new direction in Rito’s practice, extending his material sensibility into forms that are at once sculptural and architectural, intimate yet withheld. Built from salvaged wood, these upright structures evoke the language of furniture while staging a tension between access and denial: one contains a book placed upside down so its contents remain obscured, while another offers a narrow aperture closed with a lace, hinting at interiority yet refusing entry. If the metal spheres of the Untitled works invited tactile engagement, the Cabinetsliteralize this concern with thresholds, recalling domestic gestures of opening and closing while frustrating their completion.

EDOARDO RITO (B. 1999, Florence Italy)
Edoardo Rito is a London-based artist. He completed his BFA at UAL Chelsea College of Arts in 2021 and earned his MA in Fine Art from UAL Central Saint Martins in 2024. Rito’s recent exhibitions include Flotsam & Jetsam at Twilight Contemporary, London (2025), and Muriella (solo) at Santi, London (2025). Rito’s practice integrates intergenerational materials from his family heritage with architectural fragments salvaged from his surrounding urban environment. These materials are archived, reworked, and reconfigured into a multidisciplinary body of work. His work will be the subject of a forthcoming institutional exhibition at Sixi Museum, Nanjing, China (2026), where he undertook an artist residence from April to July 2025.

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