The everyday object as an aesthetic battlefield: this is perhaps one of the most persistent challenges of art over the last century. When an artist decides to appropriate elements drawn from reality, they do not perform a simple act of extraction, but trigger a semantic short-circuit that questions our perception of the world. The real object, decontextualized and transfigured, becomes a mirror of our obsessions, our voids, the infinite narratives that traverse the society in which we live. Starting from Duchampian ready-mades, art has interrogated the status of the object, transforming the banal into the sublime through the pure act of choice. The reinterpretation that contemporary artists operate today goes beyond the simple Dadaist gesture: it is no longer just about challenging the artistic institution, but rather about reading the object as a text dense with stratified meanings, a palimpsest on which the contradictions of our time are inscribed.
Marco Sisto, “Bicycle Diptych”, 2022, mixed media on jute canvas, 40 x 40 cm, courtesy the artist and Studio la Linea Verticale; Giulio Delvè, “These things happen”, 2017, umbrella handles and ceramic, 88 x 34 x 34 cm, courtesy Collezione Ghigi & Kappa-Nöun
The objects that populate our lives are bearers of a dual nature: on one hand they respond to practical functions, on the other they are vehicles of identity, status, desire. When the artist removes them from their original function – deforming them, multiplying them, hybridizing them – they perform a kind of symbolic autopsy that reveals their deeper nature, inviting us to sharpen our gaze on things, recognizing that reality is never neutral and that every aspect of it awaits to be read, interpreted and reinvented. The group exhibition Objectifiction, with which Studio la Linea Verticale opens the new exhibition season after the summer break, reflects on these themes. The exhibition brings together works by four students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna – Luca Angeloni, Andrea Mirra, Ilaria Pulcini and Marco Sisto – with three works from the Ghigi Collection signed by Giulio Delvé, Jonathan Monk and Mike Nelson, and is curated by Collettivo Cumarina (Nicla Dallago, Emma Gosparo, Valentina Lai, Emma Pinardi, Valentina Soldo) composed of students from the two-year program in Art Education and Cultural Mediation of Artistic Heritage, under the direction of Marinella Paderni.
Jonathan Monk, “Thieves Remains #23”, 2009, enameled metal, 71 x 106 x 48 cm, courtesy Collezione Ghigi & Kappa-Nöun
The exhibition’s title takes up a concept theorized by Hito Steyerl in Duty Free Art. Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (2018), in which the metaphor of airport duty-free zones describes the contemporary condition of art, today forced to operate increasingly in a deterritorialized sphere immersed in the flows of global capital. In this essay the term objectification is used to indicate a process in which art is no longer primarily a cultural or aesthetic product, but an investment vehicle, a sort of tax-exempt alternative currency in which paradoxically the works, while being treated as commodities, undergo a progressive dematerialization: sealed in their crates, rarely seen but subject to continuous exchanges, they are enjoyed in ways that assimilate them to data, certificates of ownership, entries in portfolios. From this concept derives objectifiction, a neologism coined by Steyerl by merging “objectification” with “fiction,” to indicate an operation even more complex than simple objectification: objects (including works of art) are not only reified, but their material reality is somehow “fictionalized” or constructed through narratives, speculations and projections of value, to the point of collapsing, in the contemporary financial economy, the distinction between “real” value and “fictitious” value. The term expresses a sharp criticism suggesting how objectification in the era of financial capitalism no longer produces objects endowed with material presence, but fictions of objects, simulacra whose value, while being only performative and narrative, in turn triggers a process of creating reality through financial fiction.
Jonathan Monk, “Thieves Remains #23”, 2009, enameled metal, 71 x 106 x 48 cm, courtesy Collezione Ghigi & Kappa-Nöun; Ilaria Pulcini, “In-attese”, 2025, water, food gelatin, starches, honey, vinegar, parsley, various dimensions, courtesy the artist and Studio la Linea Verticale
The fact that objects exist simultaneously as concrete things and as narrative (and financial, in Hito Steyerl’s reflection) constructions has suggested to the curatorial collective to investigate the margin of ambiguity and interpretation of works, created by artists of different generations, in various meanings arising from the intent to materialize an idea into a concrete object in the most faithful way possible to reality. The “reifiction” alluded to in the exhibition’s title, therefore, is understood in a broader sense than the German artist’s text as the ability of everyday objects to transcend their functional use to become instruments of narration and criticism, showing how art can remove them from consumer logic and restore new meanings to them, transforming them into tools of storytelling, memory and poetic resistance. The exhibited works start from recovered elements that are disassembled, assembled, reconfigured, replicated or manipulated in different ways, whose juxtaposition is useful to make explicit the continuous back-and-forth movement from thing to work that their existence implies, demonstrating how the materiality of the everyday is still an inexhaustible source of critical reflection and formal experimentation. The exhibition path effectively introduces the visitor to this reasoning by proposing two different versions of the same object, in both cases materialized through synecdoche.
Luca Angeloni, “Bulldozer”, 2024, mixed media on canvas, 170 x 270 cm, courtesy the artist and Studio la Linea Verticale
In Marco Sisto‘s Bicycle Diptych (2022) the bicycle is represented on a monochrome yellow background through portraits of its handlebars, created in a hyperrealist style ambiguous between design rendering and lucid dream as an experimentation of a material reproduction linked to the theme of memory. In Jonathan Monk‘s sculpture (Thieves Remains #23, 2009), on the other hand, the same object is impersonated by its frame stripped of all functional elements: in this case the subtraction, rather than impoverishing the object, expands its semantic field, transforming it into a sort of urban skeleton evocative of the processes of degradation and outrage to which abandoned things are subjected, but also of a mysterious anthropomorphism, inherent both in the structure and in the faint memory of its original utility. The imprint of the human gesture also returns in Giulio Delvé‘s work (These things happen, 2017), a found vase from which ten giant fingers emerge, each carved from the patient carving of the handles of the umbrellas contained inside it, an allusion to the passing of time in the surreal coincidence between the subject of the work and the (human) tools used to create it.
Mike Nelson, “Amnesiac Beach Fire”, 2021, wood, metal, plastic, 32 x 69 x 69 cm, courtesy Collezione Ghigi & Kappa-Nöun
Ilaria Pulcini‘s works, In-attese (2025) and Frame (2025), arise from an original experimentation with mixtures of edible organic materials, such as food gelatin, starches, honey, vinegar and parsley, whose mimetic qualities the artist explores in relation to other more canonical components in the artistic field, such as epoxy resin or glass. The technical challenge is to give structure to a medium that is inherently refractory to any formalization, the conceptual one is the search for a way to induce the observer to go beyond the too obvious tautology between what seems and what is represented. Luca Angeloni‘s painting Bulldozer (2024) also has to do with structure, a giant enlargement of the loader bucket of the common excavator machine recalled by the title. The identity of this object, linked to suggestions of construction and demolition, resonates somewhat like an artistic statement of intent when compared with the varied pictorial surface that accompanies it, a remarkable piece for such a young artist in managing thicknesses and chromatic textures as almost sculptural masses in a large format. In the same mental landscape finds place Amnesiac Beach Fire (2021) by Mike Nelson, a bonfire of plastic flames (obtained from a traffic cone) emanating from the ignition of pieces of wood found on the beach and reassembled, vestiges of nocturnal gatherings, from which they recover the imprint of gestures. The horizon is circumscribed by the installation Propagazioni #2 (2024) by Andrea Mirra, composed of a series of leporellos of equal size arranged open in sequence so as to reveal a continuous drawing sketched in ink that attempts to give three-dimensionality to an automatic abstraction.
Info:
AA.VV. Objectifiction
25/09/2025 – 11/10/2025
Studio la Linea Verticale
Via dell’Oro 4B, Bologna
www.studiolalineaverticale.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.
NO COMMENT