When Giorgio Agamben reflects on the condition of the contemporary as the ability to keep one’s gaze fixed on one’s own time in order to perceive not its lights but its darkness, he seems to anticipate that critical posture that animates the works gathered in the group show Di traverso at Galleria de’ Foscherari. Enrico Camprini‘s curatorial project brings into dialogue five artistic practices – those of Luca Bertolo, Giuseppe De Mattia, Enej Gala, Eva Marisaldi and Liliana Moro – united by a methodical resistance to the evidence of reality, by a gaze that configures itself as a form of gentle sabotage against perceptual and semantic certainties. In this way, the apparent simplicity of the title reveals its own conceptual density: Di traverso (obliquely/across) does not merely designate a spatial mode of crossing, but evokes an ontological condition of contemporary art, that of those who deliberately choose the oblique path, the limping step, deviation as a form of knowledge.
AA.VV., “Di traverso”, installation view, ph. Francesco Ribuffo, courtesy Galleria de’ Foscherari, Bologna
The installation transforms the exhibition space into a field of forces where each work functions simultaneously as a critical device and object of contemplation, generating what Nancy would define as the “being-with” of artistic forms. In this context, Enej Gala‘s practice manifests itself through objects that bear the imprint of their own history of breakage and mending: a car rear-view mirror shattered and then put back together with sculptural additions of sawdust and vinyl glue (Repaired rear-view mirror, Teletubbie, 2019) becomes a metaphor for a broader existential condition, that of a subjectivity that finds in its own fragility the generative nucleus of expression. The object, repaired and transformed by the artist into a ramshackle version of the puppet protagonist of the eponymous British children’s television program produced by the BBC from 1997 to 2001, does not hide its own wound but exhibits it as a trace of a process crystallized in the materiality of the work. Here repair is configured not as restoration of a lost integrity, but as production of a new form of meaning, of an elementary beauty that emerges from the scar. The artist’s other work on display (Nutcracker, 2024), presents itself as an enlarged nutcracker, whose wooden carved handles, when brought together to close the device, compose the head of the eponymous protagonist of the famous ballet by Pëtr Il’ič Čajkovskij, a tool transformed into a prince charming. The object plays with the viewer’s perception, suggesting improper uses and alternative functions that perfectly embody the oblique posture evoked by the exhibition’s title. The sculpture thus configures itself as a critical device that disrupts the automatism of recognition, inviting the viewer to rethink their relationship with objects and their presumed functional evidence.
AA.VV., “Di traverso”, installation view, ph. Francesco Ribuffo, courtesy Galleria de’ Foscherari, Bologna
Luca Bertolo articulates his research through a dual critical strategy. On one hand he presents protest signs from real demonstrations (Sign 19#03, 17#07, 17#09, #24, created between 2013 and 2019) recontextualized in the exhibition space through the cancellation of their original message by means of a painting that in each of them becomes the banner of a different style. On the other hand he proposes a clandestine rewriting of the comic Tex, renamed Ex in a linguistic game that immediately reveals the deconstructive intention of the intervention. The signs maintain their semantic charge intact but radically modify their ontological status, staging the constitutive ambiguity of contemporary political art and revealing how communication becomes increasingly problematic in an epochal context where objects can transit fluidly from one sphere to another without losing their symbolic efficacy. The comic presents itself as a unique publication, relic of an operation that generated legal consequences and the destruction of the entire print run: the work exhibited for consultation thus becomes testimony to an artistic gesture that was able to disrupt the control mechanisms of intellectual property, revealing the fragility of the devices that regulate the circulation of images in contemporaneity. The clandestine dimension of the work, emphasized by the installation that presents it as a secret object to be consulted in a secluded reading station, transforms the act of fruition into a form of critical complicity.
Eva Marisaldi, “Omissioni”, 2024, PLA, computer, software, guanti, legno, 80 x 20 x 21 cm, courtesy Galleria de’ Foscherari, Bologna
Eva Marisaldi articulates her research around the dialectic between functionality and dysfunction, presenting a robotic revisitation of the game of rock-paper-scissors (Omissioni, 2024) based on one of her performative videos from the nineties, which translates a past performative action into technological terms, creating an infinite loop where victory becomes impossible due to the synchronization of the mechanisms, perfect despite their exhibited precariousness. The artist operates a transfiguration of the ludic gesture that removes it from its competitive logic without completely canceling it, generating a phase shift between finality and infinity, between desire for victory and structural impossibility of achieving it.
Liliana Moro, “Il sé è un soggetto nomade”, 2025, borsa, carta, cemento, torcia a luce gialla, audio, dimensioni variabili, courtesy Galleria de’ Foscherari, Bologna
Liliana Moro‘s suitcase (Il sé è un soggetto nomade, 2025), from which some miniaturized newspapers folded day by day seem to emerge, constitutes a personal archive of passing time, a form of obsessive accumulation that transforms news into sculptural matter. The object emits the sound of a person snoring, introducing into the work a bodily and biographical dimension evocative of the presence of an absent body, of a subjectivity that manifests itself through its nocturnal breathing. In this way, the suitcase becomes a container of stratified memories, a device that materializes the problematic relationship of the contemporary individual with information and time, with the difficulty of metabolizing the incessant flow of daily events.
AA.VV., “Di traverso”, installation view, ph. Francesco Ribuffo, courtesy Galleria de’ Foscherari, Bologna
Giuseppe De Mattia, instead, in Primo oggetto ribelle, 2018 (2025) transforms a copper washboard into a musical instrument that, stimulated by a sewing thimble, produces sounds at regular intervals of thirty minutes, acquiring a new function as a temporal device that marks the rhythm of the visit. The same object is used as a matrix to imprint regular pleats on drawing sheets (Rivolta del primo oggetto, 2025) arranged on the opposite wall, most of which are left blank to emphasize their sculptural aspect, some serving as support for schematic watercolor drawings depicting consumerist objects of desire. In both cases, the artist operates a transfiguration of everyday objects that removes them from their original function without completely canceling it, suggesting with playful irony a semantic tension between use and contemplation, between efficacy and poetry.
AA.VV., “Di traverso”, installation view, ph. Francesco Ribuffo, courtesy Galleria de’ Foscherari, Bologna
The exhibition path unfolds through a geography of ambiguity studded with refined dadaisms, where each work functions as a station of a cognitive itinerary that proceeds through deviations and gaps from expectations. The physical proximity of the works brings out a system of meaning that exceeds the sum of the individual artistic practices, producing a semantic field where resistance to monolithic interpretation becomes an oblique form of critical knowledge of the present.
Info:
Luca Bertolo, Giuseppe De Mattia, Enej Gala, Eva Marisaldi, Liliana Moro. Di traverso
10/05 – 20/09/2025
curated by Enrico Camprini
Galleria de’ Foscherari
Via Castiglione 2/b – Bologna
www.defoscherari.com
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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