Bottles, carafes, small jars, coffee pots, tin boxes, sunlit hills, rustic houses, country roads, buildings, and courtyards are the subjects of Giorgio Morandi’s works on display. Still lifes imbued with color and light. Landscapes contemplated from a distance, walls warmed by the summer sun, buildings that seem to fade away like ashes in the wind. Everyday objects and humble, familiar places resurrected as eternal, immortal, and impervious to the passage of time, inevitable wear, and disappearance. Their timeless presence stems from the fact that they hold both the visible and the invisible. The visible retreats into the domain of the invisible, while the invisible invades and illuminates the visible in objects and landscapes. Time appears to slow down and then stop, and sensations unfold with a mysterious intimacy and intensity. In Morandi’s painting, the reality of things transforms in texture, weight, and luminosity, thanks to the painter’s technical skill and metaphysical sensitivity. The result is objects and landscapes of a substance different from that of the real world, or even the symbolic one.

Lucio Fontana’s works, with their iconic cuts, open a window onto the immeasurable that lies behind the canvas—a void revealing the unrepresentable nature of infinite space and time. These works reject optical illusions and the reproduction of reality, instead opening to the imagination of the infinite. Fontana creates a double vertigo, both conceptual and visual-perceptual. The infinite contracts between the edges of the cut, while our finitude plunges beyond the limits of representation. Before the surface, white as an unblemished page, every figurative illusion and reference to art history, real life, or historical events is denied. The mind is left free to delve into the contemplation of infinity. Fontana’s gesture was bold and definitive: cutting through the canvas so that the mind could take a virtual step into the beyond, transcending physical and cultural limits to imagine—and even feel—the boundless.

For Morandi, it was a matter of tightening the threads of pictorial language to phenomenize the invisible. Fontana, on the other hand, reduced all figurative potential to a single gesture—a cut—that aimed to be absolute but not definitive, the only possible act to open a gateway to infinity, an irreversible step toward the freedom of art.

This exhibition presents a dialogue between two of the brightest beacons of 20th-century Italian art, so different in their approach to life and artistic practice, yet both exemplary in their relentless pursuit of surpassing the limits of vision. Morandi transcended the most superficial and obvious aspects of figurative language to capture the invisible, while Fontana freed himself from the illusion of the canvas, confining infinity within the physical space of a cut or a puncture.

These two artists, who have long inhabited the collective imagination—just as Cicero said of famous figures—have undeniably transformed the way we see the world and think about art. Over recent decades, they have become reference points for artists worldwide, offering themes and insights for reflection and development in their own inimitable and equally significant ways. The exemplary stature of Morandi and Fontana has grown, solidified, and continues to grow, beyond generic and superficial definitions or ideological and linguistic constraints. In the past, such constraints sought to define and delimit their unique creative intensity through limiting stylistic formulations, which could only appear mutually opposed in personalities so different in temperament and inspiration.