Domenica

Sunday — a drawing made for AC Milan, exhibited at Museo San Siro and later auctioned.

Domenica is a work created by artist Neve in 2011, pencils on paper, 80 × 80 cm, commissioned by AC Milan for the Stadio Street Players exhibition at Museo San Siro, curated by Alessandro Paolo Mantovani.

"Domenica" is a drawing in coloured pencils on black paper, made in 2011 for A.C. Milan as part of the "Stadio Street Players" exhibition curated by Alessandro Paolo Mantovani at the Museo San Siro in Milan. The work was subsequently offered at auction (Lotto 5 – MILAN). The subject is an elderly bald man — powerfully built, with the heaviness of age — seated in a white ribbed tank top. He holds a small red portable radio (a radiolina) pressed to his right ear, the antenna extended, listening. In his left hand, a wine glass, nearly empty. A silver watch bracelet. Large rectangular glasses, slightly tinted. He looks upward and slightly to the right, his expression absorbed, inward — the small private pleasure of a Sunday listener. The work depicts football as it is experienced from the inside of a life: not the spectacle of the stadium, not the crowd's surge, but the solitary ritual of the man at home listening to the match on the radio. "Domenica" — Sunday — is the day the Italian football calendar has always centred on. The radiolina, the wine glass, the canottiera: these are the objects of a specifically Italian Sunday, specific to a generation, specific to a class. The rendering is hyperrealist — the texture of the ribbed vest, the translucency of the glass, the weight of the flesh, the precise rendering of the radio casing and metal watch links — built from the deep black ground outward into warm, modelled light. The face is treated with full care: the heavy jowls, the dome of the bald head, the slightly watery eyes behind the lenses, a slight half-smile as something on the radio pleases him. This is the football portrait its subject would not expect to be painted: not the player, not the goal, not the crowd — but the man who waits for the result alone on a Sunday afternoon.