What's the most incredible thing you've done? - Bertozzi & Casoni: curated by Alberto Mattia Martini

The phrase “What’s the most incredible thing you’ve done?” appears on a blackboard in the studio of Bertozzi & Casoni. It is part of an English exercise, a contingent element, a marginal and everyday fragment that seemingly has nothing to do with their artistic practice. Yet once read, it becomes difficult to escape its resonance: because it is precisely the “incredible” that immediately and almost instinctively defines the experience of their works. Through this concept, its reactivation as a title introduces a decisive shift, and wonder is no longer merely a quality attributed to the works, but becomes a category through which to question the relationship between reality, representation, and perception.

In the work of Bertozzi & Casoni, the incredible does not simply coincide with amazement or with the exceptional nature of technical achievement; rather, it emerges as the effect of an excess of reality. Their sculptures do not merely imitate the visible world, but intensify it to the point of instability, approaching the condition that Jean Baudrillard defined as “hyperreality,” namely the generation of a real without origin or reality[1]. Everyday objects, remnants, natural and artificial elements are rendered with such precision that they surpass the threshold of credibility, entering an ambiguous zone in which recognition transforms into doubt.

When confronted with the works of Bertozzi & Casoni, the viewer is seized by a form of perceptual hesitation. What initially appears immediately recognizable—a vase of flowers, an accumulation of objects, an animal, a residue of various elements—reveals itself, upon closer inspection, to be radically other. Ceramics, a medium historically associated with the decorative and domestic sphere, is pushed to such a degree of mimesis that it produces a short circuit between vision and understanding. This is not simply technical virtuosity, but a genuine destabilization of reality. In this sense, ceramics assume a crucial role. Traditionally linked to the domestic and decorative realm, here they are employed as a critical device: a fragile and historically marginal material becomes the vehicle for a radical questioning of the visible. Its capacity to simulate surfaces, textures, and details produces an effect of dislocation, in which what appears familiar reveals itself as constructed, and what is constructed acquires an almost unsettling presence. This ambiguity recalls Sigmund Freud’s notion of the Unheimlich, according to which the uncanny arises precisely from the return of something that is simultaneously familiar and estranged[2].

The exhibition is not organized around a single theme, but brings together a plurality of works and traverses different categories of subjects recurring in the artists’ research: floral compositions, everyday objects, industrial elements, animal presences, and accumulations of waste. This multiplicity is not dispersive, but reveals a constant: each work seems to exceed its own condition, pushing reality beyond the limit of recognizability. Every work stages a reality that exceeds itself, that stratifies, alters, and multiplies. The everyday is not transfigured, but pushed to the point where it loses stability. Particularly significant is the recurrence of accumulation: food remnants, worn objects, and heterogeneous materials aggregate into dense compositions, transforming into true relics of the present. In this sense, the works may be read through the lens of Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory,” according to which it is precisely when objects cease to function as simple tools of use that they reveal their dimension as “things,” bearers of memory and meaning[3]. In these compositions, time seems to have condensed itself, suspending processes of transformation and decomposition: the works thus configure themselves as stratified images in which past and present coexist, recalling Georges Didi-Huberman’s idea that, before an image, we are always “before time.”[4]

In works such as compositions of leftovers, trays overflowing with remains, or worn and abandoned objects, what is familiar becomes charged with an unexpected density. Likewise, more complex structures such as artificial landscapes, barrels, and aggregates suggest a systemic dimension and stage a stratified reality in which the natural and the artificial become indistinguishable, coexisting in a condition of constant contamination. Even the animal presences, suspended between vitality and artifice, contribute to this displacement, rendering uncertain the distinction between what lives and what is constructed.

The “incredible” evoked by the title does not reside solely in the represented subjects, but in the very fact that they exist in this form and in the way reality is rendered as excess. Every work is the result of a transformation of matter that makes ceramics almost unrecognizable, capable of simulating, deceiving, and seducing. The viewer is thus placed in an ambiguous condition, oscillating between attraction and doubt, between wonder and unease. This is what happens when reproduction surpasses its imitative function and becomes a process of intensification, capable of making visible what normally remains implicit: the precariousness of things, their continuous transformation, and the subtle instability that traverses what we believe to be familiar.

To this dimension of excess of reality is added a reflection on time and trace. The works of Bertozzi & Casoni seem in fact to suspend processes naturally destined for change—organic decomposition, the consumption of objects, the wear of materials—crystallizing them into permanent form. Ceramics thus become the site of a tension between duration and precariousness, between monumentality and fragility: what appears ephemeral is rendered eternal, while what seems solid and stable reveals its intrinsic vulnerability. In this temporal suspension, 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.

The question posed by the title does not find a univocal answer, but instead functions as an open device. It does not concern only the action of the artists, but also involves the viewer, who is called to interrogate their own experience of the visible, in line with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s conception of perception as an active and embodied act. Ultimately, what makes something “incredible”? Its exceptional nature, or the moment when we cease to recognize it with certainty—and the way we are nevertheless led to believe in it?

 Alberto Mattia Martini