If the sleep of reason generates monsters, as Francisco Goya taught us in the midst of the Enlightenment in the famous engraving made in 1797 and included in the Los caprichos cycle, what happens when a puddle of water falls asleep? Giovanni Termini tells us this through images and volumes in Il sonno della pozzanghera (The Sleep of the Puddle), his fourth solo exhibition at Galleria ME Vannucci in Pistoia. Unlike previous exhibitions, which arose from the exploration of different ways of occupying space, in this installation the artist worked on the specificities of the memory of the place, an industrial building that previously housed the Storai electromechanical and railway workshops, where an entire generation of Tuscan metalworkers was trained. This large warehouse, now restored and home to the gallery since 2018, still bears traces of the work processes that took place inside it on its walls and floor, which can be read as a map of memory. This space, since its foundation, has in itself had a strong aesthetic and conceptual connection with the work of Termini, who seven years ago inaugurated the gallery’s exhibition program with the site-specific project Tempo instabile con probabili schiarite (Unstable weather with possible clearings), a full-scale roof placed a short distance from the ground in which the chimney was replaced by a pile of PVC chairs.
Giovanni Termini, “Il sonno della pozzanghera”, installation view, galleria ME Vannucci, Pistoia. Courtesy the artist and ME Vannucci, Pistoia. Photo credit Michele Alberto Sereni
On this last occasion, the artist decided to start by reasoning, instead, on the floor of the main room, where the surfacing of oily oozes from below, some time after the renovation, reconnects the place to its initial intended use. The choice is, therefore, to enhance this emergence of memory by building a new spot in the center of the room, this time superficial and ephemeral because it is generated by the loss of water from a tap left to drip. The puddle, a patch that changes shape and color depending on the light that dries up, is a further memory superimposed on the existing one, as well as catalyzing important artistic reminiscences. First of all, the black spot surrounded by chairs by Jannis Kounellis (Untitled, 2006, exhibited at Fondazione Pomodoro in Milan in the exhibition Atto unico), but also the 9 square meters. of puddles (1967) by Pino Pascali, composed of nine lacquered chipboard and plaster panels (and in the artist’s idea also water) that highlighted his attention to nature, his interest in industrially derived materials and a new minimalist aspiration. For Termini too, the puddle is a mapping and a presupposition of things that happen and the events are the other works that, conceived individually and in an unrelated way, relate to each other reverberating on its liquid surface, which highlights their affinities in terms of form, affectivity, content and chromatic temperature. The fulcrum of the exhibition is therefore the mirrored fountain-sculpture powered by a rubber tube that, after crossing the entire gallery, passing through the perforated glass of a window, connects to the irrigation system of the external courtyard. If the sleep of reason generates monsters, as we said at the beginning, that of the puddle gives rise to poetry, transforming a problem (the loss of water and the need to orchestrate the work) into an act of creative synthesis.
Giovanni Termini, “Il sonno della pozzanghera”, installation view, galleria ME Vannucci, Pistoia. Courtesy the artist and ME Vannucci, Pistoia. Photo credit Michele Alberto Sereni
All the works on display have in common not only the same silvery-grey tone given by the galvanizing process to which they were subjected with the intent of making them durable over time and homogeneous among themselves, but also the fact that they derive from everyday objects humanized by a process of poetic de-functionalization. In this way the artist makes them precarious manifestations of an everyday life translated into a timeless and universal dimension, where pressing current events never enter the news. In no particular order (but calibrated to perfection) we therefore find: Limit marker (2025), an aluminum cast of a road bollard torn off and broken by an impact, a tangible memory of the transgression and a milestone of an entire road (to be built in the future) flanked by similar relics of collisions, the only object that is avowedly sculptural in the traditional sense. And then Mattress (2024-2025), a real gym mat rolled up around a tubular concrete core that materializes the central void around which it is usually wrapped. The assembly is a pretext to think about the gestures of sculpture in its soft-rigid dialectic with a strong reference to the human body, evident both in the idea of a footprint suggested by the neoprene, and in the analogy of the block as a whole with a body curled up in itself.
Giovanni Termini, “Il sonno della pozzanghera”, installation view, galleria ME Vannucci, Pistoia. Courtesy the artist and ME Vannucci, Pistoia. Photo credit Michele Alberto Sereni
Then we encounter Combination (2024-2025), a composition of easels normally used to compose mobile scaffolding, here ascending but not practicable. In this work, the spiral ascending movement of the various elements superimposed around a central pivot recalls illustrious examples from the art history such as The City Rises (1910-1911) by Umberto Boccioni or the model for the Monument to the Third International (1920) by Vladimir Tatlin, demonstrating how the artist’s poetics, despite the ordinary and almost subdued tools through which he expresses himself, is refined, aware and full of implications. If in the previous work the void had been replaced by concrete, here the scalar rotation of the easels identifies the space and movement of a sculpture that can only be imagined, whose absence reminds us that everything is unstable and can change. The easel at the top, the only one not to have been galvanized, is covered in a second denim skin, a tribute to work in its allusion to the uniform of the workers who live on the construction sites from which they were ideally taken. Along the same diagonal, on the opposite side of the room, we find Bench (2024-2025), a real piece of street furniture positioned vertically and hidden by a large sheet of flexible wood held at the two matching ends by two iron clips. The bench, isolated by this drop-shaped barrier, can no longer perform its relational function in contemporary urban planning, in which its presence is often censored by restyling projects as a possible catalyst for degradation and crowding. At the same time, a simple gesture such as loosening the clamps and straightening the bench would be enough to restore the possibility of encounter. In sculpture there is always a possibility of liberation, forms like the things of life are never categorical or definitive.
Giovanni Termini, “Tappeto”, 2024/25, lacquered wood, rubber and roll of scotch tape, 145 x 126 x 5 cm. Courtesy the artist and ME Vannucci, Pistoia. Photo credit Michele Alberto Sereni
We continue with Door (2024-2025), a galvanized iron space temporarily placed in a corner, in which the opening is screened by a tangle of iron chains that, if they were untied, would recall the fly screens in the homes of our elderly relatives, like the artist’s Sicilian grandparents. The barrier has been bypassed and the stranger has entered, but there is no place to enter because the door is not in its housing, from which it has been removed or will have to be reassembled. Finally Rug (2024-2025), a real doormat in thick workshop rubber placed on the floor and framed by lacquered panels with photographic reproductions of the texture of the wood, once again that of the sideboards from the 1950s (another surfacing of a level of memory). In the center a strange swelling, given by the presence, almost completely precluded to us, of a roll of American adhesive tape (a tic of the artist, the sly admiration for its superior adhesive power), an oversight by someone like the water tap left open that produced the puddle in the main room. It could be any other object, or even the dirt pushed with the broom under the carpet. It is interesting to note, finally, how in all the works (except The Sleep of the Puddle) the title is the pure designation of the protagonist object, a tautology that inevitably places Giovanni Termini’s research in a precise artistic line, that of the most canonical conceptual, of which he explores with intelligent lightness an unprecedented affective declination.
Info:
Giovanni Termini. The Sleep of the Puddle
Text by Saverio Verini
9/03/2025- 1/05/2025
Galleria ME Vannucci
Via Gorizia, 122 – Pistoia
www.mevannucci.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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