In the 1990s, following the end of the Cold War, the idea spread that the major ideological conflicts of the twentieth century had come to an end. The expression “the end of history”, associated with Francis Fukuyama, became a symbol of this belief.

What Remains of Ideology begins with a different question: what remains of an ideology when its symbols are no longer immediately recognisable?

The practices of Leonardo Crudi and Elia Novecento share a common origin in writing, the street, the poster and twentieth-century visual culture. With Collettivo Novecento, founded in 2016 together with curator Giovanni Argan, the hand-painted poster became a means of intervening in public space.

From this shared background, the two artists have developed different trajectories.

In Crudi’s work, cinema, the Russian avant-garde, Roman Pop, visual poetry and underground culture reappear as fragments of an active cultural memory. Figures, films and authors are brought back into the present through compositions in which image, geometry and graphic construction remain closely connected.

In Elia Novecento’s work, by contrast, the figure is progressively absorbed into the surface. Patterns, textiles, modules and abstract forms transform cultural references, personal experiences and materials drawn from different contexts into a more intimate and perceptual language.

The two practices meet in the persistence of form. The symbol does not disappear; it changes state: from emblem into structure, from declaration into rhythm, from belonging into surface.

The exhibition looks at this transformation without nostalgia for past ideologies. The melancholy running through the works concerns instead the loss of a world in which images and symbols still seemed capable of carrying shared meanings. Today, those forms continue to survive, embedded in memory, geometry and in the very texture of images.