The topic of identity in the contemporary era is configured as a polarized horizon between apparently irreconcilable extremes: the perception of being everything and that of being no one, memory and oblivion. In this investigation field, Friedrich Andreoni moves within a subtle dialectic, which runs between presence and absence, between what resurfaces and what eludes immediate understanding. His artistic research is nourished by a phenomenology of intermittence, where every attempt to construct meaning proceeds through accumulations, depletion and drifts, never granting itself the definitive clarity of a conclusion. Another Chance, the artist’s solo exhibition curated by Giulia Giacomelli at Palazzo Vizzani Lambertini Sanguinetti in Bologna, headquarters of the cultural association Alchemilla, presents itself as an investigation into the possibility of reactivating the memory of a space (in which the artist, based in Berlin, spent two months of residency) through perceptual devices that detect, analyze and mirror the architecture, transforming it into a semantic environment, loaded with clues, to be traversed. The sixteenth-century noble palace thus becomes not merely an exhibition container, but living matter of an artistic intervention that dialogues in every detail with its material and temporal stratifications.
Friedrich Andreoni, “Somewhere”, 2025, in “Another Chance”, Alchemilla, Palazzo Vizzani Lambertini Sanguinetti, Bologna. Photo © Leonardo Morfini
The work that welcomes the visitor in the central courtyard of the palace reveals from the incipit the artist’s intention to operate an archaeological transfiguration of the architectural datum. Somewhere (2025), a blue epoxy resin cast of a fireplace present in one of the rooms of the noble apartment on the first floor, presents itself overturned on the marble floor with a lightness and transparency that seems to escape its own materiality to evoke a precious mass of condensed water. The casting process, executed with professional techniques borrowed from restoration, extracts a detail sedimented at the margins of attention to assign it an unprecedented protagonism as a new center of gravity in the open space. The transposition generates a temporal short-circuit: the architectural element, deprived of its original function, appears foreign and familiar at the same time, embodying in its illusionistic immateriality a liminal zone between existence and mental projection.
Friedrich Andreoni, “no one n.one”, 2025, in “Another Chance”, Alchemilla, Palazzo Vizzani Lambertini Sanguinetti, Bologna. Photo © Leonardo Morfini
Going up the stairs to the main floor, the sound intervention no one n. one (2025) activates a reflection on the contemporary identity condition through the assonance of the English terms “one” (one) and “none” (no one). Two speakers, placed on the sides of the access door to the loggia, diffuse the artist’s voice rhythmically listing verbal variations focused on being no one: “I’m no one / nobody’s one / the broken one / one too much / the one who stays / one who burns”. This continuous score of rebounds between antithetical concepts returns the contemporary crisis of ego-reference, exploring the possibility of being in the condition of one who attempts with obstinacy to inhabit the interstices, escaping both the emphasis of definition and the inertia of invisibility. The work dialogues with a detached fresco representing the blinding of Polyphemus, originally located on the fireplace of an internal room and currently embedded in the wall of the external corridor. Suggesting an assimilation between sonic threshold and pictorial threshold, Andreoni transforms Ulysses’ stratagem into a permanent existential condition, operating a sort of phenomenology of invisibility that finds in obsessive reiteration its own generative mechanism. Having crossed the threshold, the exhibition path winds through a sequence of works that articulate different perceptual registers while maintaining constant attention to the relationship between body and architecture.
Friedrich Andreoni, “Another Chance”, 2025, in “Another Chance”, Alchemilla, Palazzo Vizzani Lambertini Sanguinetti, Bologna. Photo © Leonardo Morfini
Another Chance (2025), the work that gives title to the exhibition, also represents the moment of maximum conceptual evidence of the project, in which the speculative mechanism that in other works appears more coded is brought to light. A mechanical torch, following a circular trajectory, creates a cone of light that frames in rotation different portions of the frescoed ceiling of one of the rooms immersed in total darkness, transforming the surface of the vault into a succession of fragmentary apparitions. The artist’s strategy (here in an emblematic way, in other works in more underground manner) consists in emphasizing the precariousness of vision to institute it as a necessary precondition of an amplified perception, sensitive in receiving what vanishes through its traces. The impossibility induced by the artist to grasp the architectural structure and its pictorial covering as a whole reasons about how, in our perception, the experience of looking is one with memory, time and the instances of subjectivity. The same ambiguity between not-yet and not-anymore returns in the two large panels (obtained from a shipping crate) titled Flooding 1 and Flooding 2 (2025), the result of a detailed historiographic study of the host palace. The two architectural views, executed in charcoal on a chalky glazing that recalls the stratifications of flaking plaster in the room where they are placed, recall in dimensions and positioning the walled doors that can be glimpsed in the walls, while the intense blue on which the architectural sketches rest is the same detected among the surviving traces of a fresco located in the palace courtyard (of which, we discover at this point, the resin fireplace cast constitutes a further emanation). These elements, which acquire meaning in the stringent relationship with the historic building despite the inversion of parameters between structure and decoration, outside and inside, function as a sophisticated memorial device in which voids fill with information and incongruities become clues.
Friedrich Andreoni, “Flooding 1” and “Flooding 2”, 2025, in “Another Chance”, Alchemilla, Palazzo Vizzani Lambertini Sanguinetti, Bologna. Photo © Leonardo Morfini
The entire exhibition is traversed by a phantasmatic sound track, a sort of Gregorian monody, actually a “cover” of a famous pop motif from the ’90s interpreted by a soprano specialized in Renaissance singing, recorded in the spaces of Alchemilla. This is the installation Better off alone (2025), where a small radio next to an empty bed (allusive to the artist’s residency experience in the palace, but also to the solitude necessary to elaborate the creative act) is configured as a sonic attempt at architectural construction. The superimposition between the reverb recorded at the moment of execution and that generated by the diffusion of the sound track, incorporated in the same space, proposes an analytical reading, but at the same time integrated at a perceptual level, of its spatial and temporal stratification. The exhibition path concludes with the environmental installation Untitled (Reflectors series), 2025, protagonist of the last room, the same in which the fireplace used as matrix for the blue resin cast in the courtyard is found. Here, scattered on the ground, there are are dozens of light reflectors dismounted from torches of various sizes and origins. These bodies, deprived of their own internal light source, live on others’ light, mapping the space differently depending on the illumination they receive at different hours of the day, exactly like the reflecting shells that in the so-called “Baths of Mario” refracted and radiated natural light coming from the central oculus. In this Renaissance-era cistern, realized by the Palermitan architect Tommaso Laureti (also author of design interventions at Palazzo Vizzani Lambertini Sanguinetti) to feed the Neptune Fountain in Bologna’s main square, such elements were placed in a shell-shaped niche, analogous to the most evident decorative element of the fireplace.
Friedrich Andreoni, “Better off alone”, 2025, in “Another Chance”, Alchemilla, Palazzo Vizzani Lambertini Sanguinetti, Bologna. Photo © Leonardo Morfini
Andreoni’s intervention, in conclusion, is configured as a device of visual and memorial reactivation that, proceeding through resonances and correspondences, transforms the exhibition space into a conceptual field where every element contributes to the construction of an experience subtracted from the logic of immediate fruition. The artist operates according to a phenomenology of intermittence that finds in discontinuity its own generative force, suggesting how every traversal of space can contain within itself another possibility. The exhibition’s proposal, to be considered in its entirety as a macro-installation and not as a succession of works correlated and united by a theme, is that of a sensory and aesthetic experience to be constructed in dilated time through a process of analysis and progressive formal abstraction of the results. The historic palace, explored by the artist with maniacal attention to re-semanticize the apparently most irrelevant details in a sort of alternative measurement, acquires in this intervention a new and suggestive configuration, founded on the emergence of the mysterious aquatic identity postulated by the works on display that serve as corollary to Another Chance, at the same time conceptual engine and methodological prototype of the project.
Info:
Friedrich Andreoni, Another Chance
22 – 31/05/2025
curated by Giulia Giacomelli, within the framework of the Residencies-Studio 2025 project by Alchemilla
Palazzo Vizzani Lambertini Sanguinetti, Bologna
www.alchemilla43.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