Some exhibitions try to explain the world to you, some others exhibitions force you to doubt whether that world was ever stable. “Manipolazione di origine controllato” (Controlled origin manipulation ) by Roberto Amoroso belongs decisively to the second category. It does not offer THE answers, does not console, does not simplify – it does something more uncomfortable: it takes the continuous flow of images in which we are immersed and twists it until it becomes unrecognizable, or perhaps, finally, legible.
Roberto Amoroso, “Manipolazione di origine controllato”, exhibition view at 10 & zero uno, Venezia, ph. Filippo Molena, courtesy 10 & zero uno
At the 10 & zero uno gallery, a few steps from the Giardini della Biennale, Amoroso stages a sort of perceptual laboratory, an environment in which painting, sculpture, textile, and video do not coexist peacefully but interrogate one another, as if each medium suspected the other. It is the first time the artist presents such a substantial body of works on canvas, and one senses immediately that this is not a simple technical shift but a statement: painting, here, is neither nostalgia nor a return, but a slow instrument in an accelerated world, an almost stubborn act of resistance. We live immersed in a current of information that decides for us what is true, what is plausible, what is worthy of being believed, and Amoroso starts precisely from this point of saturation: communication has taken on an almost magical dimension, a narration form that no longer needs to be verified because it already functions as a story, and when artificial intelligence enters the picture, reality ceases to be representable and becomes something to be regulated, directed, manipulated.
Roberto Amoroso, “Manipolazione di origine controllata”, exhibition view at 10 & zero uno, Venezia, ph. Filippo Molena, courtesy 10 & zero uno
The title of the exhibition is an oxymoron that sounds like an impossible certification (“manipulation” and “controlled origin”) and appears as a warning not so much about the images themselves as about the processes that generate, alter, and distribute them: in an ecosystem dominated by technological monopolies that transform data into commodity and experience into product, the image loses all innocence and reveals its political, economic, even bellicose nature. Amoroso’s canvases are born from a multitude of digital images – fragments without hierarchy, visual offcuts, residues of browsing – which in the passage to painting are emptied of their original function: they do not illustrate, do not explain, do not narrate in a linear way, but compel a slowed, almost laborious vision that runs against the speed with which we normally consume content, as if the artist were asking us to unlearn how to look in order to start again from scratch.
Roberto Amoroso, “Manipolazione di origine controllato”, exhibition view at 10 & zero uno, Venezia, ph. Filippo Molena, courtesy 10 & zero uno
The other works do not serve as backdrop but amplify the discourse: the sculptures from the “Fake Muse” series take a historically passive figure and transform it into something refractory, resistant, while the banner “Mea Culpa” works on military and religious imaginaries in order to hollow them out from within, producing visual short circuits in which power cracks and exposes itself. The video “Behind the Curtain #2” pushes this process of disaggregation even further: images that accumulate, deform, hybridize, until they construct a world that no longer functions through oppositions but through contaminations, where identity is never given but always in construction or in crisis. The implicit question of the exhibition then is not “what are we looking at?” but “who is looking through us?” because if images are never neutral, every act of vision also becomes a political act.
Roberto Amoroso e Bruno di Costanzo, “Fake muse”, 2026, gruppo di 5 sculture di porcellana, conchiglia, acrilico 11x13cm, dettaglio ph. Filippo Molena, courtesy 10 & zero uno
Amoroso, however, does not limit himself to denouncing this state of affairs: he reclaims the possibility of a different manipulation: declared, conscious, one that does not serve to control but to imagine, that does not conceal its own mechanisms but exposes them. In this sense, his practice becomes almost ethical before it is aesthetic. Leaving the exhibition, one does not have the sensation of having understood something definitive, but rather of having lost a few certainties and in this time of ours, in which everything seems designed to reinforce our convictions, this loss may be the most radical gesture possible.
Info:
Roberto Amoroso. Manipolazione di origine controllato
critical text by Carlo Sala
14/03 – 18/04/2026
10 & zero uno
Castello 1830, via Garibaldi, Venezia
10zerouno.com
Independent artist and curator. Founder of No Title Gallery in 2011. I observe, study, ask questions, take informations and live in contemporary art, a real stimulus for my research.
NO COMMENT