Yellow Submarine unfolds as an immersive, exploratory underwater journey into the visionary paper universe of Pietro Antolini. This site-specific project, hosted within the evocative capsule-like spaces with their iconic yellow floors at 5C LAB – formerly the workshop of the historic turner Orlando Martello and, since 2024, home to the cultural association Serendippo – presents a selection of artist’s books alongside small two- and three-dimensional paper sculptures. The body of work revolves around the sea, inhabited by predominantly imaginary, zoomorphic, and hybrid creatures: fish, seahorses, shells, and mollusks which, while occasionally recalling natural forms, are reconfigured through the artist’s fervent imagination into singular presences. Alongside these appear monsters, tritons, and bicaudal mermaids—figures suspended between worlds, seemingly emerging from archaic iconographies rooted in Romanesque sculpture, medieval bestiaries, and decorative repertoires of archaeological origin.
Pietro Antolini, “Yellow Submarine”, installation view at 5/C LAB, Bologna, ph. credit Serendippo, courtesy the artis
In close dialogue with the space, these presences inhabit niches and shelves, drift along wooden staircases, settle among the machinery of the former workshop, and surface – almost buoyantly – from the drawers of the large wall cabinet, generating a sui generis aquarium–Wunderkammer in which craftsmanship and imaginative speculation interpenetrate, producing a pervasive sense of enchantment. Welcoming the visitor is Murena (2018), a color peepshow book conceived for events dedicated to artist’s books, which functions as a visual threshold: the wide-open mouth of the fish introduces the viewer to its elongated body containing marine landscapes, as if it had swallowed them whole. From this tunnel book unfolds the series The Sea in Black and White, initiated in 2019 and composed of medium- and large-format accordion books, developed in parallel with the small paper sculptures. Dominated by a rough, “lived-in” black and white—articulated through a spectrum of greys with occasional accents of gold and silver—the works are punctuated by inserts of colored tissue paper that catch and refract light, intermittently flickering, evoking for the artist the luminous qualities of Gothic stained glass. Constructed from intaglio printing paper – cut, folded, glued, painted, incised, and treated with oil and wax – the books are presented as perceptual devices: wings or stage flats from which marine figures emerge as true epiphanies.
Pietro Antolini, “Yellow Submarine”, installation view at 5/C LAB, Bologna, ph. credit Serendippo, courtesy the artis
The process is grounded in a practice of cutting, in which scissors and tearing replace the pencil, and the act of incision substitutes drawing in its initial phase. The cut elements are subsequently painted and assembled into a compositional whole. Drawing, in the conventional sense, does not precede but rather concludes the work, defining details through incisions made with points and blades across layers of color. The gradual emergence of images from an indeterminate sketch through overlapping planes has naturally led Antolini toward the artist’s book as a primary medium. A similar approach informs the small paper sculptures, likewise dominated by black and white, occasionally interrupted by chromatic accents. The silhouettes of these fantastic creatures – drawn from imaginary, dreamlike, and fairy-tale realms—seem to emerge from pitch-black nights and storm-laden waters traversed by myths, ancestral rites, and popular beliefs. They surface among the continuous strips of paper in the accordion books, which become waves and landscapes, or linger there in a state of suspended display. The sea, together with the element of water, has long carried a symbolic charge linked to what escapes human control: primordial chaos, unfathomable depth connected to the unconscious, a site of initiatory journeys, a liminal space of passage and transformation, at once generative and destructive. The exhibition foregrounds this force, exploring the primordial energies associated with the marine realm while celebrating its untamed nature and its inexorable pull toward the unknown.
Pietro Antolini, “Yellow Submarine”, installation view at 5/C LAB, Bologna, ph. credit Serendippo, courtesy the artis
Within this silent, poetic chant, Antolini gathers – almost as if conducting a census – his mirabilia, where poetic invention merges with visual inquiry into anatomy and interspecies relationships, echoing a Renaissance conception of integrated knowledge in which naturalistic observation intersects with mythopoetic imagination. Fantastic beings, together with a diverse marine fauna – often hybridized with anthropomorphic traits – thus become a metaphor for diversity, where difference is not anomaly but a generative condition contributing to a complex and harmonious ecosystem. The theatrical books on display, devoid of a single direction, textual guidance, or linear plot, do not aspire to traditional narrative nor to the sequential logic of silent books; rather, they present themselves as spaces for traversal and contemplation. A defining feature of the leporello format lies precisely in its capacity to introduce a “physical” temporality of experience: it unfolds, extends, and is traversed. The experience thus takes shape within a phenomenological space, recalling the reflections of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in which perception is processual, unstable, and continuously in flux. The works develop through a layering of stage-like planes positioned at varying distances from the page margins, forming mutable ecosystems that unfold across the entire length of the book. Suspended between painting—particularly echoes of Primitivism – and illustration, they invite multiple viewpoints, while privileging a frontal mode of viewing: a sequence of openings that follow one another, progressively contracting into visual echoes. A sense of suspended narration permeates these works, privileging discontinuity over linear progression: an intentionally imperfect narrative that interrupts, falters, pauses, and resumes. Chiaroscuro emerges here as both an aesthetic and ontological condition.
Pietro Antolini, “Yellow Submarine”, installation view at 5/C LAB, Bologna, ph. credit Serendippo, courtesy the artis
Antolini operates through subtraction, excavating matter to approach an originary dimension—an ᾰ̓ρχή—that surfaces through slow processes of layering and sedimentation. This modus operandi, repetitive yet generative, assumes the character of a ritual practice. Even dust, settling into the folds of the cut surfaces and producing silvery reflections that enhance the tactile and luminous qualities of the works, becomes an active element – a trace of time and its stratifications. From his early experience as a restorer in workshops across Emilia, the artist retains a sensitivity to ancient patinas, the stratification of color in historical plasters, and the use of varnishes, fillers, waxes, pigments, and earths. “When I use color,” Antolini notes, “I evoke surfaces that contain time through layering and veiling. There is another aspect I carry with me from that profession: the sense of working on damaged objects, poised between marginality—leading toward oblivion—and the possibility of restoration”.
Pietro Antolini, “Yellow Submarine”, installation view at 5/C LAB, Bologna, ph. credit Serendippo, courtesy the artis
The Sea in Black and White ultimately presents itself as a visual requiem: a meditation on loss and transformation that engages with the urgencies of the Anthropocene. The artist’s interest in zoology, biology, and ethology translates into a reflection on wounded ecosystems-from rising temperatures to coral bleaching, from biodiversity loss to ocean acidification-where white signals erasure and depletion, while black condenses into a destructive trace and an embodiment of deep-seated fears. Antolini imagines his marine universe being observed through the eyes “of a frightened underwater Diogenes, probing the seabed with a faint light: the gaze of one who is irretrievably lost and, in solitary disorientation, encounters presences and things”. Initiated in 2019, The Sea in Black and White has since expanded into an oceanic project-one that the artist himself admits may never reach completion.
Info:
The Sea in Black and White. Artist’s books and paper sculptures by Pietro Antolini
curated byTristana Chinni
12.04.26 – 23.4.26
5C LAB
Vicolo de’ Facchini 5C – Bologna
www.serendippobo.com
After classical studies, she enrolled at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy in Bologna, graduating in History of Cinema (DAMS) and later in Art History. She obtained a Master in Communication for cultural enterprises. Journalist and critic, she collaborates with various print and online magazines specialized in the artistic and cultural sector, including Finestre sull’Arte, Segno, Exibart, Zeta-International magazine of poems and research, Punto e Linea Magazine, Gagarin Orbite Culturali. She loves art in all its forms, preferring modern, contemporary and research.
NO COMMENT