With Fantastica, the 2025 Quadrennial Art Exhibition presents itself as a project that embraces imagination not as an escape from reality, but as a critical tool capable of reformulating the present. Conceived by Luca Beatrice, who passed away suddenly in January 2025, this edition carries with it the weight and responsibility of a vision that could not be directly measured by the outcome of the exhibition, but which remains legible as a diffuse conceptual structure. Beatrice had imagined Fantastica as a field of forces, not as an orderly map: a place where contemporary Italian art could show itself in its ability to generate alternative worlds, images and narratives, without being constrained by rigid genealogies or identity formulas.
18th Quadriennale d’arte, Fantastica, Palazzo Esposizioni Roma, October 11, 2025 – January 18, 2026, installation view of the section curated by Luca Massimo Barbero. In the photo, works by Emilio Gola, Siro Cugusi, Roberto de Pinto, courtesy Fondazione La Quadriennale di Roma, Photography Agostino Osio – Alto Piano
The title does not refer to a specific aesthetic, but rather to a stance: that of an art that accepts ambiguity, symbolism, excess and invention as legitimate tools of knowledge. In this sense, Fantastica bucks the trend of a long season of practices strongly anchored to documentary data or explicit criticism, reopening a space for storytelling, for visionary imagery, for a complexity that cannot be reduced to a thesis. The structure of the exhibition, divided into five sections entrusted to curators with different approaches and sensibilities, conveys this idea of plurality without ever reducing it to a peaceful synthesis. On the contrary, the sections function as autonomous territories, sometimes in friction with each other, capable of bringing out divergences and affinities within the same generational horizon. Rather than a unified narrative, the Quadriennale takes the form of a polyphonic device, in which curatorial choices become true critical instruments.
18th Quadriennale d’arte, Fantastica, Palazzo Esposizioni Roma, October 11, 2025 – January 18, 2026, installation view of the section curated by Emanuela Mazzonis di Pralafera. In the photo, works by Giovanni Ozzola and Jacopo Benassi, courtesy Fondazione La Quadriennale di Roma, Photography Agostino Osio – Alto Piano
The section curated by Luca Massimo Barbero addresses the theme of self-portraiture not as a narcissistic exercise, but as a space of friction between subject and representation. Here, the image of the self becomes unstable, traversed by masks, projections and symbolic constructions that challenge the idea of identity. In dialogue with this, but on a more intimate and narrative level, there is the section by Francesco Bonami, who works on the concept of memory as an individual, layered and non-linear space. Here, memory is not configured as nostalgic recovery, but as an unstable construction, made up of omissions, rewritings and imagination.
18th Quadriennale d’arte, Fantastica, Palazzo Esposizioni Roma, October 11, 2025 – January 18, 2026, installation view of the section curated by Francesco Stocchi. In the photo, works by Lutù Nuti, Valerio Nicolai, Luca Bertolo, Martino Gamper, Pietro Roccasalva, Arcangelo Sassolino, courtesy Fondazione La Quadriennale di Roma, Photography Agostino Osio – Alto Piano
With Emanuela Mazzonis di Pralafera, the discourse shifts to the domain of the image and its uncontrolled proliferation. Photography, video and digital images are addressed as cognitive environments that shape the perception of reality. Francesco Stocchi‘s curatorial proposal introduces a clear change of pace. Here, the focus is on doing, on the process, on the materiality of the work as the result of physical, temporal and energetic tensions.The exhibition concludes with a section curated by Alessandra Troncone, dedicated to the body as an unfinished, hybrid entity, undergoing technological, political and symbolic mutations. Here, the body definitively loses its normative function and becomes a surface for projection, conflict and desire. The selected practices question the idea of identity as a fluid construction, challenging traditional boundaries between natural and artificial, organic and technological, human and non-human. Taken together, these sections do not construct a unified discourse, but rather a system of resonances and contrasts.
18th Quadriennale d’arte, Fantastica, Palazzo Esposizioni Roma, October 11, 2025 – January 18, 2026, installation view of the section curated by Alessandra Troncone. In the photo, works by Agnes Questionmark and Iva Lulashi, courtesy Fondazione La Quadriennale di Roma, Photography Agostino Osio – Alto Piano
Artists such as Luisa Lambri and Gianni Caravaggio shift the self-portrait away from the face, delegating it to space, form and relationship, while more directly figurative practices, such as those of Roberto De Pinto, show how the body can become a narrative surface and a place of slippage. The contemporary self-portrait is no longer a statement, but a field of negotiation. Examples of pictorial practices, including those of Marta Spagnoli and Runo B, intertwine personal experience and fiction, giving shape to stories that oscillate between presence and absence, between confession and critical distance. Memory thus becomes a narrative device rather than an archive. Irene Fenara and Emiliano Furia work on the loss of control over images, highlighting their ambiguous nature: at once information, simulation and disturbance. In this section, images do not clarify but complicate; they do not represent but disorientate, revealing the fragility of contemporary visual regimes. The works of artists such as Arcangelo Sassolino and Lulù Nuti reject narrative in order to assert themselves as events: systems in precarious equilibrium, actions that unfold over time, materials subjected to stress and transformation. The work does not communicate a message, but manifests itself as an experience, as a direct encounter with a force.
18th Quadriennale d’arte, Fantastica, Palazzo Esposizioni Roma, October 11, 2025 – January 18, 2026, installation view of the section curated by Emanuela Mazzonis di Pralafera. In the photo, works by Irene Fenara and Andrea Camiolo, courtesy Fondazione La Quadriennale di Roma, Photography Agostino Osio – Alto Piano
Fantastica thus establishes itself as a Quadriennale that deliberately refrains from offering an exhaustive snapshot of contemporary Italian art, preferring instead to convey its tensions, contradictions and still-open possibilities. It is an exhibition that does not seek consensus, but attention; that does not offer answers, but poses questions. In this sense, Luca Beatrice’s legacy does not lie in a definitive message, but in the choice to entrust art with the most risky task: that of imagining, without guarantees, forms of meaning that have not yet been codified. Throughout the exhibition, there is a tension – not a consolatory one – towards a redefinition of languages, in which the boundaries between discipline, form and action become increasingly blurred.
18th Quadriennale d’arte, Fantastica, Palazzo Esposizioni Roma, October 11, 2025 – January 18, 2026, installation view of the section curated by Luca Massimo Barbero. In the photo, works by Roberto de Pinto, Siro Cugusi, Vedovamazzei, courtesy Fondazione La Quadriennale di Roma, Photography Agostino Osio – Alto Piano
In the Quadriennale, Italian art after 2000 not only recounts a stylistic horizon, but also traces fields of experience in which image, memory and the body are reflected and transformed into new constellations of meaning. In light of the choices curated by Barbero, Bonami, Mazzonis di Pralafera, Stocchi and Troncone, Fantastica is not a single narrative but an ensemble of perspectives that coexist, intertwine and diverge. The exhibition thus becomes a critical device for interpreting contemporary life, an invitation to perceive art as a process and a possibility rather than a definitive statement. Fantastica is not a celebration, but an unstable field in which art returns to being, first and foremost, an exercise in possibility.
Info:
AA.VV., Fantastica. 18ª Quadriennale d’arte
curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, Francesco Bonami, Emanuela Mazzonis di Pralafera, Francesco Stocchi, Alessandra Troncone
10/10/2025 – 18/01/2026
Palazzo Esposizioni Roma
Via Nazionale, 194 – Roma
quadriennalediroma.org
Art Curator and Art Advisor, graduated in Visual Arts and Cultural Mediation, with Master in Curatorial Practices, born in 1995, lives in Naples. He collaborates with Galleries and Independent Spaces, his research is mainly focused on Emerging Painting, with a careful and inclined gaze also on other forms of aesthetic language.
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