Even before entering the rooms of ABC-ARTE, visitors are welcomed by a question displayed on the wall: What’s the most incredible thing you’ve done? This is the title chosen by Alberto Mattia Martini for the exhibition dedicated to Bertozzi & Casoni, born from a phrase found almost by chance on a blackboard in the artists' studio in Imola. A simple English exercise, perhaps, which the curator wrests from everyday life, transforming it into the conceptual threshold of the entire exhibition project. It is not a title imposed on the artworks, but a question that emerged from the very place where they take shape. And it is precisely from the spirit of that studio—an authentic archive of ideas, objects, memories, and wonders accumulated over more than forty years of research—that an exhibition is born, capable of conveying the universe of Bertozzi & Casoni without pretending to enclose it within a single interpretive key.
The artistic duo’s first solo exhibition in Liguria, the show brings together around thirty works and traverses the fundamental core of their research. Floral arrangements, everyday objects, industrial elements, animals, references to art history, and monumental accumulations of waste coexist within the gallery spaces, building an itinerary that proceeds through associations and continuous surprises. Rather than a retrospective, it is an immersion into a coherent imaginary world, where each work dialogues with the others while maintaining a strong narrative autonomy. It is no surprise, then, that the exhibition is attracting a large and surprisingly diverse audience, reaching far beyond the specialized realms of contemporary ceramics.
It is in front of these works that something unusual happens. After the initial impact, the desire to draw closer arises almost inevitably. Not to catch a missed detail, but to verify a doubt: a crease in the plastic, the transparency of a wrapper, the corrugated surface of cardboard, the lightness of a feather all seem to ask for a confirmation that the eye alone can no longer provide. The gaze slows down, retraces its steps, and continually shifts its point of observation. It is difficult to resist the temptation—inevitably frustrated—to reach out a hand toward the surface of the works, because sight is no longer enough to distinguish what is real from what is simulated through ceramics.
It is a surprising experience even for those who regularly engage with this medium. Bertozzi & Casoni force the viewer to grant themselves time. Every return to the work reveals a detail that had escaped notice just moments before. Rather than simply being looked at, these sculptures are traversed by the gaze. One is naturally led to think of Mary Acton’s reflections in Looking at Pictures, where the author insists on the need to educate the viewer toward a slow gaze. The exhibition seems to translate that lesson into a concrete experience. It does not merely invite the public to slow down: it creates the conditions so that they cannot do otherwise. In a present dominated by the rapid consumption of images, Bertozzi & Casoni restore to observation the time that belongs to it.
Only then does the nature of their virtuosity emerge. The ceramic loses all recognizability: it becomes plastic, metal, glass, cardboard, organic matter. Yet it would be a mistake to stop at mimetic perfection. Illusion is the device through which the artists fracture our confidence in perception, forcing us to reconsider the relationship between what we see and what we believe we know.
Among the works on display, Terra! (2019) represents the most intense moment of the exhibition. Monumental in scale and ambition, it is an extraordinary celebration of the beauty found in industrial waste. Accumulation turns into a landscape; waste becomes a subject of contemplation. It is impossible to take it in with a single glance: the eye traverses it like a territory, following an inexhaustible web of details and relationships. In a city that has built its identity on labor, its port, and the transformation of materials, Terra! acquires an even deeper resonance. Its monumental geography of waste seems to dialogue with the industrious memory of Genoa, reminding us how even that which is expelled from the production cycle continues to safeguard the history of the labor that generated it.
Alberto Mattia Martini accurately captures the essence of this research when he writes that “objects configure themselves as vestiges of the contemporary, testimonies of an anthropological condition marked by accumulation, consumption, and the continuous transformation of the material world.” A definition that shifts the focus from a simple repertoire of objects to their ability to recount our time. The accumulations of Bertozzi & Casoni are not mere compositions, but rather archives of the present and ecosystems of contemporaneity. They preserve the memory of consumption, waste, domestic habits, and human labor, while simultaneously giving life to new balances in which each element continues to dialogue with the others. Ceramics halts the ephemeral destiny of these materials and spares them from decomposition, turning them into permanent testimonies of our time.
Within these landscapes, animals with a marked sense of theatricality often make their appearance. They perform neither an ornamental nor a purely symbolic function: they are characters, silent actors who seem to dialogue with the human-made world. Emblematic is the case of the parrot, a blue-and-yellow macaw—a species accustomed to dense tropical forests—which Bertozzi & Casoni imagine anthropomorphized, intent on building its shelter inside a Warholian Brillo Box. The pop culture icon thus becomes an improbable contemporary habitat, where nature and artifice end up coexisting within the same image.
Warhol, like César, Manzoni, Fontana, and Rauschenberg, is not a mere reference, but rather one of the interlocutors in a dialogue that spans the entire exhibition. It is no coincidence that these citations concentrate primarily around the climate of the Neo-Avant-Garde, a period when art radically redefined the very concept of the artwork by welcoming everyday objects, revaluating waste, and questioning the value of matter itself. If Warhol reflects on the seriality of consumption, Manzoni on the commodification of the artwork, César on the fate of industrial waste, and Fontana invites us to go beyond the surface, Bertozzi & Casoni inherit that legacy without ever merely repeating it slavishly. Their response comes through ceramics—understood not only as a technique, but above all as a language capable of rescuing the present from its natural and physiological disappearance.
When leaving the gallery, the initial question continues to accompany the visitor: What’s the most incredible thing you’ve done? After traversing this universe, one is almost tempted to answer that the most incredible feat of Bertozzi & Casoni does not consist in having transformed ceramic into plastic, cardboard, or metal, but in having restored dignity to what we are accustomed to discarding. It is no coincidence that Stefano Dal Monte Casoni repeatedly recalled how even a landfill could reveal unexpected beauty, if only one could observe it without the odor that inevitably accompanies it. This is perhaps the intuition that runs through the entire exhibition: restoring dignity to what society has led us to define as waste—showing that, at times, art simply teaches us to recognize the incredible right before our eyes.
