At Galleria Studio G7 in Bologna, a partnership spanning over fifty years is renewed. Out of the Painting, Franco Guerzoni’s twelfth solo exhibition in the gallery’s spaces, marks a homecoming for the Modenese artist, who has maintained a relationship with this venue that began in 1973. The exhibition, open until December 27, 2025, unfolds through a tight dialogue between painting, architectural space and time, confirming a research that has always questioned the boundaries of representation. The title refers to a tension that runs through Guerzoni’s entire trajectory, that need to transcend the pictorial surface, to cross the boundaries of the painting to make it dialogue with the surrounding space. Here painting does not close in on itself, does not exhaust itself within the perimeter of the canvas, but extends, breathes, contaminates the walls. The large painted panel conceived for these spaces, The Forgotten Wall (2025), the seminal work of the exhibition project, becomes the fulcrum of a broader system, where image and architecture, painting and wall, float in a fluid and permeable dimension.
Franco Guerzoni, “Out of the Painting”, installation view, Galleria Studio G7, Bologna, photo by Francesco Rucci, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Studio G7
The works presented all originate from the same period, in a sort of organic coherence that binds the paintings to the wall interventions and sculptural fragments. They are surfaces that speak of time and memory, with that dusty consistency that is the hallmark of Guerzoni’s work. Dust is not dirt but patina, it is the visible sign of time’s passage, that quality that makes surfaces eloquent. And time is truly, as Marguerite Yourcenar stated in her essay of the same name, the invisible sculptor of these works, which seem to bear layers of existence, sedimented memories, traces of presences and absences. The palette moves between earth tones, grays and dirty whites, interrupted by sudden jolts of vivid color – an intense blue, a red that emerges like a wound – that break the chromatic quietness without ever overwhelming it. The wall is as much a protagonist as the painting. For Guerzoni, the wall has always been a central subject, dating back to the days of his photographic collaborations with Luigi Ghirri in the seventies. Walls for him «are books to leaf through, pages that underlie other pages, palimpsests in which each layer preserves the trace of previous ones». His work could be defined as an archaeology of the everyday, fascinated not only by the cultured and monumental kind, but also by the banal kind encountered while walking, «like a puddle of water with a sprout and a stone underneath», small fortuitous landscapes evocative of ancient stratifications. What interests him is the digging, seeing what lies beneath, imagining being able to look through surfaces with vision sharpened simultaneously by electromagnetic waves and ultraviolet rays to probe their infinite hidden structures.
Franco Guerzoni, “Out of the Painting”, installation view, Galleria Studio G7, Bologna, photo by Francesco Rucci, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Studio G7
The “shards,” sculptural fragments made of scagliola, a poor and fragile material (but treated so as not to be such), applied to the walls function as the interior of painting made visible, its three-dimensional extroflection. They are pieces that dialogue with the large painting, sharing its chromatic matter and tactile sensitivity, but introducing a plastic dimension that courts bas-relief. The base gauze is at times left visible, to emphasize that this is not illusion, not trompe-l’œil, but matter that bears the traces of making. Some thin lines run across the surfaces, creating a dialogue between two-dimensionality and relief, between painting and sculpture, in a borderland that Guerzoni has always frequented with fascination. Slowness is a constitutive part of this work. While he admires artists capable of acting on canvas with the speed and immediacy of gesture (he thinks of Schifano, «perhaps the last romantic», with that ability to enter the painting as if it were already finished), Guerzoni proceeds through overlays, reconsiderations, sedimentations. His paintings need «much adhesion», require time to find their balance. It is a process that reflects his interest in the temporal dimension, in that «ruin worked by time» which is not decay but transformation, stratification of meaning.
Franco Guerzoni, “Out of the Painting”, 2025, pigments on scagliola, cm 48 x 13 x 7 cm, ph. Francesco Rucci, courtesy l’artista e Galleria Studio G7
The fascination with the origin of art, with the moment when there is not yet a defined author or signature, with signs that concern both structure and writing, is what deeply moves this research. Historical culture – which Guerzoni observes attentively by visiting exhibitions as if they were mental representations to prepare before entering the rooms – is not nostalgia but living dialogue. If the contemporary artist serves any purpose, he suggests, it is perhaps precisely to «keep the artists of the past in check», to keep thought and historical culture in movement through one’s own work. The archaeological quality of his work, therefore, does not arise from nostalgia, but from a circular movement that the artist describes as a continuous «entering and exiting» the painting in an incessant motion of coming and going. Painting for him has never been a closed, self-sufficient form, but a threshold to cross, a boundary to question. And on the threshold between two and three dimensions are also placed the scagliola sculptures applied to the wall, which seem to want to emerge from the surface without ever completely abandoning it, sharing with the painting the idea of being able to evoke multiple perspectival directions without renouncing the two-dimensional structure. In Out of the Painting, this tension between surface and depth, between image and object finds a very successful formulation. The works dialogue with the gallery space naturally, as if that need to expand beyond the boundaries of the painting had finally reached a form of balance, matured in research conducted with coherence for decades. Painting, therefore, breathes in space, space welcomes painting, and between the two we can inhabit that intermediate dimension where memory and present, matter and image, find their provisional, fragile composure.
Info:
Franco Guerzoni. Out of the Painting
fragments, asynchronies, notes by Andrea Viliani
30.09-27.12.2025
Galleria Studio G7
Via Val D’Aposa 4A, Bologna
www.galleriastudiog7.it
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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