Galleria Giovanni Bonelli

Pietrasanta, Italy

June 21st - July 21st 2025

In Seeking Softness, Abdus Salaam offers not so much an exhibition as a gesture—an open-handed invitation into a world where gravity is not a law, but a suggestion. Conceived and created during a six-week residency in Pietrasanta, without assistants or automation, the works carry the unmistakable imprint of solitude and intention. Here, in this city of stone, Salaam carved a quiet theology of tenderness—one that feels both ancient and urgently new.

The materials are familiar: marble, pigment, and sound. But what unfolds through them is not craft alone. It is a meditation on grace and weight, on softness as strength, and the sublime, paradoxical power of gentleness.

The centre of the exhibition, both literally and thematically, is the sculpture titled Seeking Softness. Two stone forms, each seemingly caught mid-transformation: one curling upward, lifting in an impossible defiance of its mass, the other melting, gently dissolving at the edges, as if remembering it was once fluid. Together, they form a kind of duet—a physical prayer—that speaks to transcendence not through resistance, but through surrender. In this act of soft rebellion, the stone reaches beyond itself.

This is a language of inversions. Feathers press into marble. Stone bends like breath. The impossible is rendered not as spectacle but as inevitability—what else could happen, in a world where softness is sovereign?

Throughout the exhibition, feathers appear again and again—not as symbols of fragility, but as quiet agents of transformation. In one work, a single feather carries the full weight of stone, its quill unscathed. In another, the feather seems to emit a frequency that liquefies marble like a feather falling on a quiet pond, revealing the vulnerability hidden beneath the surface of things. These are not sculptures of contrast, but of union. The hard and the soft, the eternal and the ephemeral, no longer opposed, but folded into one another.

It is no surprise to learn that these gestures were partly inspired by Salaam’s visit to Florence and his encounter with the Uffizi’s storied collection. There, amid the marble folds of saints and seraphs, he found a new lexicon—one where stone could mimic skin, cloth, breath. But in Seeking Softness, the influence is not mimicry; it is memory. A remembering that even the most solid of materials was once molten. That hardness is not a truth, but a condition.

Encircling the space are twenty-one small paintings—pulsing, shifting fields of colour that evoke landscape only in the loosest sense. They do not depict places; they reveal states. Violet to green, yellow to blue—each painting vibrates with an inner resonance, designed not only to be seen but to be felt on a frequency beyond language. They form a kind of chromatic chant, a rhythm of internal weather, suggesting that softness is not only an external gesture, but an inner alignment.

This sentiment carries gently into the sonic landscape of the exhibition, where sound becomes another dimension of touch. Composed, performed, and recorded in parallel with the making of the sculptures and paintings, the music threads through the gallery like incense—sometimes barely audible, sometimes cradling the room in harmonic presence of hang, guitars, vocals and flutes. It does not accompany the work so much as it completes it, creating a porous field in which material and immaterial, image and tone, memory and sensation intermingle. Here, the exhibition begins to echo Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk—the total artwork—where all senses are called into communion, and the distinctions between seeing, hearing, and feeling dissolve. The viewer does not observe the work from the outside; they are folded into it, enveloped in a world where softness becomes a state of being.

Here, Salaam’s practice dissolves the border between material and metaphysical. His marble melts, but so does the viewer’s sense of certainty. What is soft? What is strong? What is true? The works do not answer. They invite.

And in the midst of it all, the artist’s poem Seeking Softness offer the titles for each work:

Seeking Softness
The weight of softness Sounds of softness
The strength of softness
Is the breath of stillness
In the depths of your embrace Where I wait,
Seeking softness.

In a world caught in the clenched grip of speed and sharpness, Seeking Softness returns us to something primal, something deeply human: the knowledge that to yield is not to break, but to become. That grace is not weakness. It is law. A law older than gravity. A law written not in stone, but into the space between touch and silence.

In that space, Abdus Salaam carves a home. Not for answers, but for presence. Not for permanence, but for feeling.

And in the presence of these works, one cannot help but soften too.