From 20 September 2025 to 16 January 2026, the deconsecrated church of San Carlo in Cremona opens to a new dimension of research and imagination with 100 Giorni, a site-specific project by Massimo Bartolini.
Made possible thanks to the commitment of Lorenzo Spinelli, the initiative confirms San Carlo as a space devoted to contemporary artistic creation and shared experimentation.
Upon entering the nave, visitors encounter a large unlit Sicilian luminaria: a geometric, modular structure that is both imposing and fragile. This is the second time Bartolini has worked with traditional Southern Italian luminarie, presenting them in their dormant state, deprived of light and reduced to the essential skeleton of their wooden framework. In this suspended condition, the luminarie become architectures of pure promise: they evoke festivity without celebrating it, holding a potential energy that could ignite at any moment — or perhaps never again.
This visual device constructs a diaphanous, almost metaphysical space, where celebration seems frozen in time: already over, or not yet begun. As always, Bartolini operates on the threshold between the real and the symbolic, transforming the absence of light into a form of presence — an emptiness that asks the viewer to fill it with their gaze and imagination.
Behind the altar, another intervention introduces a perceptual reversal: a red neon light switches on, giving voice and visibility to two wall writings discovered inside the Cremona prison. Whereas the luminaria is marked by the removal of light, here light becomes illuminated text — a testimony emerging from the margins and made public. The artist’s gesture connects two distant worlds — the collective dimension of festivity and the intimate one of the incarcerated individual — creating a tension between freedom and confinement, between silence and revelatio
100 Giorni thus takes shape as a double threshold: a space where light oscillates between presence and absence, and where what is visible never fully coincides with what is perceivable. Bartolini constructs an unstable equilibrium that invites visitors to pause, observe and imagine.
Massimo Bartolini (Cecina, 1962) is one of the most significant figures in contemporary Italian art. His practice — weaving sculpture, installation, sound and performance — has gained international recognition through his participation in the Venice Biennale (2013 and as the artist of the Italian Pavilion in 2024), Documenta 13 (2012), the Bangkok Art Biennale (2020), and exhibitions at major institutions such as Centro Pecci, Fondazione Merz, South London Gallery, Palais de Tokyo and MAXXI.
Chiesa di San Carlo, Cremona
Via Stefano Leonida Bissolati, 33
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