Opening Giuseppe Pietroniro 24 January 2026

On Saturday, 24 January 2026, starting at 5 p.m., LABS Contemporary Art will inaugurate the exhibition …dove tu stai, anche io sarò by Giuseppe Pietroniro, curated by Giuliana Benassi. This is the artist's first solo exhibition at the Bologna gallery, presenting a body of previously unseen works that fit into the gallery space as a single choral intervention designed specifically for the location.

Giuseppe Pietroniro's research has always stood out as a constant practice of reconfiguring space and subverting classical perspective coordinates. Since the 1990s, the artist has experimented with the use of different media – photography, drawing, installation and sculpture – as tools for investigating space.

For this exhibition, the artist has constructed the show by approaching the gallery space as a narrative context, in which the concepts of scenic space and textual space merge. Pietroniro uses the walls as sheets of paper, entrusting the thin line of graphite with the task of weaving the logical thread of the presumed plot. The work Tutti in uno (2026) takes the form of a large-scale drawing that breaks through the environmental coordinates. In contrast, in the drawings on cotton paper, he conceptually makes a hand-drawn “photocopy” of collages he has created, based on the construction of surreal and incoherent environments that nevertheless exist in the vision of the work. In his work, the artist often investigates perspective perception, the creation of new points of view and the “archaeological” use of collages made up of layers or juxtapositions of images. The same happens with the medium of painting – in the works Modulo pinto (2025) – which take the form of further devices for spreading spatial trajectories: the colour fields follow geometric patterns to allude to possible “skewed” environments. This shift in perspective encapsulates the essence of the plot: the tension between utopia and dystopia and the suspension of judgement for a later discernment.

In these sterile environments, hints of presences, in the works entitled Anvil (2025) and Codirosso (2025), the figurative aspect becomes carnal. A butterfly and a small bird (the latter stuffed) are potential flight, symbolic presences that highlight a state of fragility, but also of resilience. A game of illusions and allusions that border on the possibility of rewriting the plot of the story each time. Throughout the gallery space runs the text signed by the curator, a mysterious extract from a collection of short stories entitled Sibillina, a meta-text that aims to highlight the possible opening of new perspectives, where everyone is invited to project their own assertions and points of view.

The entire exhibition brings together works of various materials and proportions, each participating in the game of ambiguity of perception triggered by the location. Like a single staging, the “acting” interventions give light to ubiquitous visions through contrasting fragility and perspective seductions.