After the Cross, the City

Thierry De Cordier's NADA and Milan’s Quiet Measure

Hans Pauwels, Reinhilde Gielen, and Aesthetic Nomads

Sep 17, 2025

“I’m working on paintings that are supposed to represent nothing. I’m nowhere yet. In doing so, I wonder if anything is harder than painting nothingness.”
—Thierry De Cordier, for NADA, Fondazione Prada, Milan

Maybe the best art is this: architecture of nothingness.

Inside the Cisterna’s three post-industrial volumes—spaces that read like ritual—Thierry De Cordier’s NADA works hang like a monochrome tide: ten vast canvases, heavier than paint, weighted with ambience. They do not depict; they subtract. Christ disappears, the cross recedes, and what remains is a rigorously sustained void.

In Ghent in 2012, a Gran Nada hung in the sanctuary of Sint-Baafs Cathedral. Draped in sacrality, it imposed reverence. We felt small, fragile, and mortal in front of it. Religion dictated our reading and hid the painter’s intent. The painting proclaimed divinity rather than its erasure.

Not so in Milan. Here, the paintings don’t speak. They enforce silence and patience.

*NADA, Thierry De Cordier, Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy*

De Cordier began these canvases as a symbolic obliteration of the crucifixion image. Over time, the gesture thickened into something else: revelation instead of negation, rigor instead of rebellion. NADA slides into the place where INRI once sat—a subtle, seismic substitution. Here, standing before Gran Nada, you feel time stretch; vision hesitates; the painting shows nothing and, in doing so, reveals the condition of seeing itself. In a world of relentless display, De Cordier proposes an ethics of opacity.

Step back outside, and the city continues its sentence.

Milan embodies austerity and excess, stone and sparkle. The rigor inside Fondazione Prada doesn’t end at the door; it reverberates in the city’s own habit of restraint, its black-clad confidence, and its talent for making space around what matters.

*Shirin Neshat, Body of Evidence, PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea — Il Salumaio di Montenapoleone, Via Santo Spirito*

Perhaps that is the promise of NADA here: not an ending, but a threshold. From the unadorned rooms of the Cisterna, Milan opens like a second canvas, one that trades images for intervals and noise for cadence. The tableau begins in black, but it travels outward, into streets that practice their own liturgy of form and measure.

And restraint.

Because without it, elegance would cease. And Milan is all about elegance.

It speaks in meter: a strict stanza of stone where repetition becomes grace. Geometric precision in the evening sun sets the buildings aglow. The rigorous backdrop of a diamond-stuccoed wall counterpoints the anticipation of another bustling dinner among business partners or friends. Dining and masonry are moral stances.

And in its boutiques, the ritual simply changes its object and stages a choreography where bodies, garments, and glances know their marks. Outfits are edited, not amassed. A practiced silence is designed to make looking feel like consent. It’s not spectacle but ceremony, the city’s ethic of measure applied to desire. If De Cordier subtracts image to enhance presence, fashion retail subtracts clutter to grant attention.

*Brioni, via Gesù — Paper Moon, via Bagutta — Marchesi 1824, via Monte Napoleone*

Milan edits itself in real time: it reveals by withholding; it signifies by dimming.

Trattenere is the verb that best describes the city—to hold back. That’s why it’s a perfect fit for NADA: an urban ethos of selective opacity, a habit of self-control that lets form—and people—keep their depth.