Until March 22, 2026, the Civic Museums of Ancient Art of the Civic Museums Department of the Municipality of Bologna host, in the galleries of the Civic Medieval Museum, L'ornamento non è più un delitto, a solo exhibition by Alessandro Moreschini, curated by Raffaele Quattrone and produced in collaboration with Ehiweb and Pasöt.
The exhibition project is part of the institutional program of ART CITY Bologna 2026 (5–8 February), the series of exhibitions, events, and initiatives promoted by the Municipality of Bologna in collaboration with BolognaFiere on the occasion of Arte Fiera.
L'ornamento non è più un crimine: with this statement, made by Renato Barilli in a 2020 text dedicated to Lily van der Stokker and Alessandro Moreschini, the itinerary of the artist’s new exhibition at the Civic Medieval Museum of Bologna opens. What began as a critical remark has now become the title and interpretive key of a project that rereads the decorative tradition as an ethical gesture, as a practice of care and attention toward the world.
For a long time Alessandro Moreschini (Castel San Pietro Terme, 1966) has chosen a secluded and rigorous path, far from the rhetoric of austere minimalism and the promises of hyper-technology: a path in which ornament is not an addition but a form of thought; not a mask, but a revelation. His worked surfaces—meticulous, vegetal, hyper-decorative textures—do not clothe objects: they transform them. They are breathing presences, silent microcosms capable of slipping into the interstices of the visible and restoring to everyday objects an unexpected energy, an inner vibration.
Already in the late 1990s, Barilli had identified Moreschini as an original voice on the Italian scene, including him in the historic group exhibition Officina Italia and recognizing in that young decorative rigor a radiating force, “a precious filing of iron.” Today, that intuition has reached full maturity in a body of work that has developed steadily, deepening the political and sensitive nature of ornament.
For ornament—long banished from the Western canon as superfluous or suspect—re-emerges here as a glocal language: attentive to non-hegemonic visual cultures, open to desire, spirituality, and the affective dimension of looking. It is an art that appears “weak,” because it rejects monumentalism, yet is in fact radical in its closeness, in its becoming a daily presence, in its reweaving of the ties between body, object, and world.
The encounter with the Civic Medieval Museum offers Moreschini an ideal terrain: a space made of stratifications, memories, votive objects, minute preciousness, miniatures, and gold—elements that for centuries have questioned our relationship with the sacred, the symbolic, and the evocative power of surfaces. The contemporary works slip among the historical artifacts without competing with them, instead establishing an osmotic, at times secret, dialogue in which light, color, and decorative rhythm become bridges between different epochs and sensibilities.
The exhibition itinerary—spread across several rooms of the museum—welcomes interventions conceived as integrative, not invasive presences: works that grow like a visual ivy over the architecture and objects of the past, forging unexpected connections. The artist does not impose a new museum; he reveals an inner, emotional one, made of decorative whispers, luminous shivers, and details that invite viewers to slow down, to look closely, and to rediscover the time of observation.
“I conceived the exhibition design as an act of listening. Alessandro Moreschini’s works were not meant to impose themselves on the Medieval Museum, nor to camouflage themselves within it: they were meant to resonate. For this reason, I chose a path that allows the works to slip among the historical objects like living presences, capable of creating subtle, almost secret connections without interrupting the continuity of the place. Ornament thus becomes a bridge between epochs, an act of care that restores to the museum its dimension as a lived space. I wanted the visitor to perceive the encounter—not the overlap—between past and present: a low-voiced dialogue made of details, reflections, and vibrations. An installation that does not add, but reveals,” explains curator Raffaele Quattrone.
In a present characterized by rapid visual consumption and an increasing delegation of imagination to automated technologies, Moreschini’s project stands as an act of resistance: an invitation to return to manual labor, to gesture, to the slow gestation of surfaces; to recognize in ornament not an escape, but a responsibility toward what surrounds us.
Renato Barilli writes: “I have intervened several times on the work of Alessandro Moreschini, entirely singular, as this exhibition confirms, where two levels can be discerned: there are precious collectible objects, but as if that were not enough, a rain of refined fragments descends over everything, further enhancing the overall preciousness.”
L'ornamento non è più un delitto thus becomes a poetic, political, and anthropological statement: the recovery of a language that can be intimate and universal, humble and complex, ancient and contemporary. A language that inhabits, that grows, that becomes a place. That becomes, precisely, a secret museum.
Alessandro Moreschini. L’ornamento non è più un delitto
A cura di Raffaele Quattrone
Con un testo di Renato Barilli
17 gennaio 2026 – 22 marzo 2026
Museo Civico Medievale, Via Alessandro Manzoni 4 | 40121 Bologna
