Giovanni Termini: PostAzione: memory as stage between inheritance and latency

The exhibition hall of KAPPA-NöUN welcomes the visitor with an installation that concentrates in a single sculptural gesture Giovanni Termini’s (Assoro, 1972; lives in Pesaro) reflection on memory, on work and on the layers of existence that sediment in objects traversed by multiple lives. PostAzione, the title of this exhibition project, in its linguistic formulation contains a double meaning: on one hand it evokes the posteriority of action, the coming after, acting in response to listening to previous memories; on the other it designates the work station, that daily place where the artist carries out his transformative operations. At the center of the space, a drawing table with drafting machine emerges from a stage supported by galvanized scaffolding tubes. A red architect’s lamp, classic professional model, rises from the shiny and mirroring surface like a solitary beacon lit to illuminate an empty scenario. Under the table, concealed among the metallic geometries of the stage, a stool covered with blue synthetic fur can be glimpsed. The lamp’s light will remain lit uninterruptedly, day and night, even when the exhibition space will be closed and solitary.

Giovanni Termini, “PostAzione”, 2026, palco, tecnigrafo, lampada, sgabello, 160 x 600 x 400 cm, ph. Carlo Favero, courtesy the artist, Galleria ME Vannucci e KAPPA-NöUN. Si ringrazia lo studio Eliseo Mattiacci per la concessione del tecnigrafo e dello sgabello di Pino Pascali

Giovanni Termini, “PostAzione”, 2026, stage, drafting machine, lamp, stool, 160 x 600 x 400 cm, ph. Carlo Favero, courtesy the artist, Galleria ME Vannucci and KAPPA-NöUN. With thanks to Eliseo Mattiacci studio for the loan of Pino Pascali’s drafting machine and stool

This enigmatic configuration becomes clear when one traces back to the genealogy of the objects that compose it: the table, the drafting machine and the stool come from the studio of Pino Pascali (Bari, 1935 – Rome, 1968), Apulian artist who died in a motorcycle accident in 1968 at only thirty-nine years old, shortly after the inauguration of his solo room at the Venice Biennale. After his death, the works present in his studio were donated to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, while the archive of projects, drawings and photographs preserved there constituted the founding nucleus of the Pascali Museum that would arise some years later in Polignano a Mare (BA). The artist’s parents decided however to retain some objects from the studio to donate them to Eliseo Mattiacci (Cagli, 1940 – Fossombrone, 2019), fraternal friend of their son, who used them daily as support for his artistic practice, taking them with him when at the end of the nineties he moved from Rome to Pesaro. These work tools thus became silent witnesses of a second creative life, absorbing the gestures, drawings, projects and thoughts of another artist. Giovanni Termini encountered them in Mattiacci’s studio and immediately intuited their evocative power.

Memory functions through successive accumulations and reorganizations: the collected elements are arranged in sequences that time constantly modifies, changing the names of things, transforming their meanings and making previously invisible connections emerge. Termini meditated at length on how to configure this biographical material belonging to others, on what form to give to an inheritance so dense with personal and artistic implications. The result is an installation that proceeds through subtraction rather than accumulation: the elevated stage makes the work station impracticable and forces the visitor to a lateral and fragmentary vision, inducing them to assume oblique postures to grasp the presence of the stool hidden among the supporting structures. This compositional choice affirms the complementary importance of the lower part of the work, hidden like the withdrawn space of the studio where the process of artistic creation is accomplished. Drawing and then erasing, doubting, starting over from the beginning: Pascali and Mattiacci, the actors evoked by this scenography, inhabit the space as presences still alive in the objects they touched, used and consumed.

The only light source of the installation (to which by day is added the soft natural light that filters through the windows) comes from the central lamp that projects a cone of white light onto the surface of the empty table. This perpetual light functions as emblem of memory that continues to work incessantly even in darkness, reorganizing memories, producing associations, generating new configurations of the past. The absence of any material trace on the table’s surface amplifies this phantasmatic dimension. The shiny surface reflects only the ceiling and walls of the exhibition space, incorporating the surrounding architecture in its mirroring surface. The reference to 32 metri quadrati di mare circa (1967), that basin filled with water tinted with blue aniline that transforms a banal element into poetic mirror, emerges here in translated form. As in that work the horizontal surface of water invited to look inside, so the table raised on stage forces the spectator to question what is underneath, to consider the hidden layers that support every visible manifestation.

The Klein blue fur that covers the stool, a leftover fragment of the material used by Pascali for his famous Vedova Blu (1968), applied by him to that element of his daily equipment, introduces an underground note of color in an installation otherwise dominated by metallic grays and the white of the walls. This fragment of synthetic azure, residue of a work dedicated to the poetic transfiguration of industrial materials, condenses in itself multiple resonances. Pascali had worked on the capacity of poor materials to evoke other worlds, transforming basins of colored water into seas, heaps of earth into dunes, layers of synthetic fur into tactile landscapes. His playful and at the same time rigorous approach had demonstrated how sculpture could generate imaginary spaces through minimal operations of translation and estrangement. Termini inherits this lesson incorporating it in a reflection on temporal stratification and on the persistence of objects beyond the life of those who possessed them, calling into question our problematic relationship with things and with their capacity to endure beyond oblivion. Mattiacci’s decision to keep for himself the work tolls rather than a finished work by Pascali to maintain physical contact with his friend’s memory in the daily repetition of his studio gestures reveals a profound understanding of this dynamic.

Termini brings to completion this chain of transmissions by subtracting the objects from practical use to combine them in a generative configuration. The empty table that awaits a project, the tools ready for use, the light that illuminates a work still to be begun: all these elements suggest the possibility of a future, of a resumption of work, of a continuity between generations. The title PostAzione indicates with precision this double temporal movement. Coming after means inheriting, collecting the baton, giving new form to what has been transmitted. The work station remains active even when no one occupies it, because it continues to produce meaning through its presence charged with memory. The choice to use scaffolding tubes as supporting structure introduces a constructivist note that dialogues with the artisanal dimension of the drawing table, while the organic softness of the fur maintains alive the perceptual involvement. The mirroring surface of the table incorporates the surrounding space multiplying the perspectives and creating plays of reflections that vary according to the observer’s position. And it is precisely this attention to the aesthetic quality of the installation that prevents the work from slipping into commemorative rhetoric, making it function simultaneously as homage, as critical reflection on artistic transmission and as spatial experiment.

PostAzione documents the passage of an inheritance through three generations of artists linked by elective affinities and common aesthetic choices. Pascali, Mattiacci and Termini share an approach to sculpture founded on the use of ordinary materials transfigured through minimal operations of contextual displacement. All three work with different strategies on the capacity of objects to generate semantic short circuits when they are subtracted from their functional destination. Pascali privileges a playful and spectacular dimension, Mattiacci develops a more austere and conceptual vocabulary, Termini adds a reflective and melancholic dimension that interrogates the relationship between permanence and transformation. In an era obsessed with continuous innovation, a work that looks to the past through the tools of the artistic trade proposes an alternative temporal circularity, in which dialogue with what has been permits to recognize inheritances and at the same time to mark distances, keeping open a space of critical interrogation on the nature of artistic making. The installation remains faithful to Termini’s poetics while representing an exception in his research, as a rule founded on the sampling of anonymous objects from the urban and industrial dimension and on their transformation through operations of assemblage, concealment, lifting or overturning that revealed latent potentialities. Here, in an unprecedented manner, he confronts himself with objects charged with personal history and affective resonances, exposing himself to the danger of slipping into sentimental anecdote and of indulging in celebratory commemoration. Termini avoids these traps through the formal rigor of a solution that prevents immediate emotional identification and forces a distanced reflection on the mechanisms of memory sedimentation in objects and on the modalities with which art can translate them into form without betraying their complexity.

Info:

Giovanni Termini. PostAzione
02/02/2026 – 14/03/2026
text by Roberto Carbonara
KAPPA-NöUN
Via Imelde Lambertini 5, San Lazzaro di Savena (BO)
instagram.com/kappa_noun

Emanuela Zanon

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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