Antonio Scaccabarozzi – Diafanés. The exhibition at the Fortuny Museum in Venice

The Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia presents, in the spaces of the Fortuny Museum, the exhibition Antonio Scaccabarozzi. Diafanés, a project curated by Ilaria Bignotti and Camilla Remondina, in collaboration with Galleria Clivio and the Antonio Scaccabarozzi Archive.

Antonio Scaccabarozzi - Diafanés, Museo Fortuny, Venezia. Photo: Irene Fanizza

The exhibition presents an intervention dedicated to one of the most rigorous and singular strands of Italian art in the second half of the twentieth century, placing the work of Antonio Scaccabarozzi (1936–2008) in dialogue with the figure and legacy of Mariano Fortuny. The comparison — guided by structural affinities rather than formal analogies — explores a shared conception of the artwork as a space of passage and experience.

Best known for his pictorial research of the 1970s, in which arithmetic calculation is combined with chromatic and dimensional variables, Scaccabarozzi developed an unprecedented visual language expressed through translucent and transparent membranes — sheets of acetate or polyethylene — capable of generating spaces for exploration. These works investigate the relationships between architecture, observer, and artistic practice, exerting a lasting influence on generations of contemporary artists.

A visionary inventor of techniques that reshaped the relationship between landscape and body, between antiquity and modernity, Mariano Fortuny is recognized for designing extraordinary forms — such as pleating — that radically transformed the very idea of clothing. Both artists can be regarded as refined and attentive weavers of diaphanous works, entrusted to the viewer’s gaze and experience with the implicit invitation to be examined and traversed — to be seen through their layered structures in a contemplation charged with poetry.

Antonio Scaccabarozzi, Untitled (Shaped Polyethylene), 1999, double-cut polyethylene, 76 x 85 cm. Courtesy Galleria Clivio

The title Diafanés refers to the quality of bodies that allow themselves to be traversed by light, offering a cross-cutting interpretive key to the project. The exhibition unfolds through approximately twenty works, including two interventions in direct dialogue with the museum’s permanent collections. The presentation is complemented by a section dedicated to the relationship between Scaccabarozzi’s research and contemporary design, featuring a creation by designer Maria Calderara, as well as an inclusive project for partially sighted and blind visitors, developed by the Antonio Scaccabarozzi Archive in collaboration with the Istituto dei Ciechi di Milano. Mediation activities and an interdisciplinary public program accompany the project.

The exhibition assumes an unprecedented role within the Venetian context due to the artist’s historical connection with the city: Scaccabarozzi was represented by Galleria del Cavallino, in dialogue with the intellectual milieu of the postwar period. Today, he is the focus — for the first time — of an exhibition capable of restoring, in Mediation activities and an interdisciplinary public program accompany the projectan organic way, the relationship between his work and Venice. The city’s aquatic and atmospheric qualities find a deep resonance in his works, characterized by diaphanous, light, and shifting stratifications that explore degrees of visibility, perception, and the relationship between individual, environment, and temporality.

Antonio Scaccabarozzi, Merate (Polietilene sagomato), 2000, Polietilene tagliato doppio, 137 x 95 cm. Courtesy Galleria Clivio

LIFE AND WORK

A leading figure in analytical and conceptual painting, Antonio Scaccabarozzi developed over more than forty years a coherent and radical language aimed at examining the foundations of the visual through a phenomenological and mathematical investigation of color within the space of the pictorial event. Following his neo-concrete and programmed-art experiences of the 1960s and the analytical research of the 1970s, the artist reached a mature expressive phase in a practice that is at once conceptual and lyrical, where painting emerges as a continuous negotiation between measure and freedom, design and contingency, calculation and emotion.

Beginning in the 1980s, the series Quantità libere, Polietileni, Banchise, and Ekleipsis marked a decisive turning point in his research. The adoption of polyethylene sheet as a primary medium transformed the pictorial surface into a diaphanous, versatile, and ethereal membrane: no longer a simple support, but an operational field in which painting redefines itself as event, process, and spatial relation. Cut, folded, layered, shaped, or left slack, polyethylene becomes an autonomous work, addressing at a new level the problem of vision and its limits, the recto and verso of painting, and its environmental extension.

As the artist himself stated: “The idea is to place the work in the boundary zone of opposing forces, where the tension established between the configuration of the object and the gaze that moves beyond it charges this idea with vitality.” Within this framework, the exhibited works — suspended or laid out in space — establish an active relationship with the architecture of Palazzo Fortuny and with the visitor’s body, inviting an experience of seeing constructed through passage, displacement, and duration.

With Antonio Scaccabarozzi. Diafanés, the Fortuny Museum reaffirms its role as a site of research and experimentation, offering the public an immersive journey in which historical memory and contemporaneity enter into dialogue, prompting reflection on the limits and possibilities of visual perception.

ANTONIO SCACCABAROZZI. DIAFANÉS

Museo Fortuny, Venice

January 28 – April 6, 2026

Curated by Ilaria Bignotti and Camilla Remondina

In collaboration with Clivio Gallery and Antonio Scaccabarozzi Archive

Quaderni di Pittura_1: the winners of the Combat Prize 2025 Gallery Award on view at SAC – Spazio Arte Contemporanea

Opening: Saturday, February 14, 2026, h 18:00

Livorno. SAC – Spazio Arte Contemporanea is pleased to present Quaderni di Pittura_1, an exhibition bringing together the works of Francesca Filicaia, Gemma Mazzotti, Nikko Mundacruz, and Marila Scartozzi, the four artists awarded the Gallery Prize as part of the 2025 Combat Prize.

The exhibition project builds on and further develops the dialogue initiated with the artists during the previous edition of the Combat Prize, opening a new phase of exchange and research between their individual practices and the exhibition space.

Exhibition invitation

Quaderni di Pittura_1 is the first chapter of a project conceived as an open series: not an exhibition understood as a final outcome, but a device intended to unfold over time as a space for observing, testing, and listening to contemporary painting. The reference to the idea of a “notebook” points to a processual dimension, made of notes, returns, and sedimentations, in which the image never becomes definitively fixed but remains open to the possibility of change.

Marila Scartozzi, Senza titolo, 2025, mixed technique on paper, 21 x 29 cm. Courtesy l'artista

In a present dominated by speed and the overproduction of images, painting today seems called upon to question its own self-evidence. Rather than producing recognizable figures, it becomes a space in which to slow down the gaze, make the duration of making perceptible, and challenge the transparency of the image and its immediate legibility. In this sense, the exhibition takes shape as a field of tension between memory and presence: memory understood as a silent reservoir of inner images and sedimented experiences; presence understood as the act of painting itself, made of gesture, layering, and the resistance of matter.

Francesca Filicaia, Sing me a song 'til I wake up again, 2024, oil on paper, 50 x 35 cm. Courtesy l'artista

Between these two poles operates the imagination, not as an escape from reality but as a device of transformation. Images are not simply remembered or observed: they are reconstructed, deformed, and recombined. Pictorial matter holds the time of the work within it and preserves its traces, resisting any definitive closure of the image.

Gemma Mazzotti, Dana in the sun, 2024, oil on canvas, 150 x 100 cm. Courtesy l'artista

Within this shared horizon, the four artists’ practices unfold through distinct yet interrelated languages. Francesca Filicaia works with intimate and silent subjects—faces, objects, isolated figures—that slowly emerge from the background, keeping the image in a state of suspension. In Gemma Mazzotti, landscape becomes a perceptual field, built through a shifting balance between drawing and color, transparency and opacity. In Nikko Mundacruz, the image turns into an emotional and atmospheric space, conveying fragile presences marked by a constant tension between closeness and distance. Finally, in Marila Scartozzi, painting is crossed by a conflicted relationship with reality: figures surface from unstable layers, suspended between emergence and dissolution.

Nikko Mundacruz, There's Nothing Between Us, 2025, oil and acrylic on canvas, 100 x 74 cm. Courtesy l'artista

In Quaderni di Pittura_1, painting does not present itself as a surface to be quickly deciphered, but as a space of duration and relation. The exhibition itself appears as an open notebook: a place where the image never fully coincides with itself, but remains unstable, available, and awaiting the gaze.

In dialogue with the exhibition, SAC presents two portrait-focused workshop sessions led by the exhibiting artists (20 February 2026, 9:30 a.m.; 27 February 2026, 10:00 a.m.). An extension of the project in the form of practice: the image as process, the portrait as a space of relation, the gesture as duration and threshold.

Quaderni di Pittura_1

14 February – 28 February 2026

SAC – Spazio Arte Contemporanea

Via L. Boccherini 22, 57124 Livorno (LI)

www.sac-spazioartecontemporanea.com

Info: info@premiocombat.it

Tel: +39 331 130 3702

Alessandro Moreschini. L’ornamento non è più un delitto

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.

Alessandro Moreschini, Ora et labora, 2004, tempera acrilica su metallo, cm 198 x 154 x 7; 86 chiavi inglesi cm 16 x 3 x 0,4 cad. Bologna, MAMbo - Museo Arte Moderna Bologna

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.

Alessandro Moreschini. L'ornamento non è più un delitto, Veduta di allestimento, Bologna, Museo Civico Medievale, 2026. Courtesy Settore Musei Civici Bologna | Musei Civici d'Arte Antica

“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