Until December 20, 2025, Marignana Arte in Venice presents Préludes o della forma in-attesa, a group exhibition featuring works by Greta Ferretti, Olga Lepri, and Sara Pacucci.
In music, the prélude is a piece that precedes the main work — a fragment played “with the curtain closed,” an announcement of what is about to unfold. The term derives from the Latin praeludere (“to play before”) and carries within it the sense of an exercise, a preliminary play that prepares but does not define. In the prelude, everything remains open, undefined, in-waiting. It is a form that has not yet taken shape, but already contains within itself the promise of what may come.
This concept lies at the heart of the exhibition. Préludes o della forma in-attesa does not celebrate the completed work, but rather that fragile, auroral moment in which form first emerges into the light. It is a project that reflects on creative freedom as an irreducible act — art as an exercise in openness and risk, standing against the predictability of automated production and digital conformity. In an age when images are generated and consumed at algorithmic speed, the prelude becomes a human gesture, a poetic form of resistance, an act of indetermination.
The works of Ferretti, Pacucci, and Lepri dialogue precisely within this suspended space. In Nello sguardo di Rubina by Greta Ferretti, the image surfaces as a vision that brushes against eternity, suspended between intuition and memory. In Sara Pacucci’s paintings, such as The Lost Dream and Before the Sun, painting becomes apparition — an image that “visits us,” as the artist writes — poised between revelation and dissolution. Olga Lepri’s works, finally, inhabit a time of waiting and “not-yetness”: in pieces like Battito (Slipaway) and Applauso (Slipaway), form appears as a blind gesture, a drawing that anticipates vision, a rhythm that prefigures seeing.
What unites the three artists is not a shared style, but a critical stance toward time and perception. Préludes thus becomes a collective reflection on painting as the space of beginnings — a form open to the unforeseen, resisting the rigidity of completion.
The exhibition unfolds through three rooms — one for each artist — culminating in a shared space where their languages intertwine. It is a dramaturgy of perception: Ferretti’s luminous rigor opens the gaze, Pacucci’s softness welcomes it, and Lepri’s ascent releases it. Through this movement, the show becomes both an immersive experience and a meditation on the time of art — no longer the time of production, but that of beginning, of promise, of the form that has not yet fully emerged.
Walking through the rooms of Marignana Arte, the visitor enters a suspended landscape, where painting does not represent but waits. Préludes o della forma in-attesa is, ultimately, an invitation to linger on the threshold of the possible — where art rediscovers its most authentic power: to hold, to evoke, to open toward the new.
Marignana Arte
Dorsoduro 141, Rio Terà dei Catecumeni, Venezia
Date 4 ottobre - 20 dicembre 2025
