On Saturday, January 24, 2026, from 5:00 pm, LABS Contemporary Art will open the exhibition …where you are, I will also be by Giuseppe Pietroniro, curated by Giuliana Benassi. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition with the Bologna gallery and presents a corpus of previously unseen works that inhabit the gallery space as a single choral intervention conceived specifically for the venue.

Giuseppe Pietroniro’s practice has long been distinguished by a continuous process of spatial reconfiguration and the subversion of classical perspectival coordinates. Since the 1990s, the artist has experimented with a range of media — including photography, drawing, installation, and sculpture — as tools for investigating space.

For this exhibition, the artist conceived the gallery as a narrative environment in which scenic space and textual space merge. Pietroniro uses the walls as though they were sheets of paper, entrusting the thin graphite line with weaving the logical thread of a presumed plot. The work Tutti in uno (2026) takes shape as a large-scale drawing and a breakthrough of environmental coordinates. Conversely, in the drawings on cotton paper, the artist conceptually performs a hand-made “photocopy” of collages created by him and based on the construction of surreal and incoherent environments that nonetheless exist within the vision of the work. Throughout his practice, Pietroniro often investigates perspectival perception, the creation of new viewpoints, and the “archaeological” use of collage through the layering and juxtaposition of images. The same occurs in the painted works Modulo pinto (2025), which function as further devices for dispersing spatial trajectories: the fields of color follow geometric partitions in order to allude to possible “askew” environments. Within this displacement of perspective lies the very essence of the plot: the tension between utopia and dystopia, and the suspension before a subsequent act of discernment.

Inhabiting these aseptic environments are hints of presence. In the works Anvil (2025) and Codirosso (2025), the figurative aspect becomes corporeal. A butterfly and a small bird — the latter taxidermied — embody flight in potential, symbolic presences that evoke both fragility and resilience. It is a play of illusions and allusions that opens onto the possibility of continually rewriting the narrative of the story. Running throughout the gallery space is a text written by the curator: a mysterious excerpt from a collection of stories titled Sibillina, a meta-text intended to emphasize the possible opening of new vistas, where each viewer is invited to project their own assumptions and points of view.

The exhibition as a whole weaves together works of varying materials and proportions, each participating in the ambiguity of perception triggered in dialogue with the space. Like a single staging, these “performative” interventions illuminate ubiquitous visions through contrasting fragilities and perspectival seductions.