2026
Related to a primary color whose inner fire evokes energy, power, love, strength, and luck, but also passion and intense sexuality, Fil Rouge becomes a moment of reflection on the idea of connection, contact, relationship, and inevitable correlation. It aspires to transform each work into a piece of a larger mosaic, into an epistructure of a linguistic system that intertwines artists from two countries united by the subtle line of an interculturality based on dialogue, confrontation, and mutual exchange.
Reunited under the common denominator of a chromatic dominance whose emotional concatenation symbolizes the importance of community and human relationships, the works engage in a dialogue with one another to tell stories of invisible connections. Color is not assumed as a mere iconographic theme, but as a conceptual device capable of generating relationships and reactions, linking different people and places, and bringing to the surface—between tradition and innovation—personal and collective lives that animate a versatile identity, always open to transformative experiences under the impulse of a knowledge that is, above all, consciousness.
Fil Rouge is an incorporeal apparatus that, through distinct works, invites meditation on a network of connections marked by a chromatic allusion whose role becomes the metaphor for a world where there is always a bond that unites. If red—present in almost all the works that compose this exhibition (and where it is deliberately absent, the work is charged with a green that inevitably refers to its complementarity)—manifests as a constant heartbeat, as an invisible thread linking matter and gazes, oscillating between density and depth, between incandescent luminosity, between suspended tension and the desire to desire desired things, the metaphorical thread that emerges from it leads the public to be guided by an intense presence, to follow its metamorphoses, nuances, and softness.
In its guise as a color that offers no definitive answers but rather opens questions, stimulating memory and igniting the imagination, red becomes, in this exhibition, shared experience and emotion—an indelible trace that accompanies the gaze beyond the exhibition space.
Starting from an ancient folk legend of Chinese origin—datable to the Tang Dynasty period (618–907 AD) and later spread throughout East Asia—which speaks of the indestructible red thread of fate, of a red line that binds two people, a meaning also found in the theory of “twin flames” formulated by Ibn Hazm in The Ring of the Dove (1022), to which are added Andreas Capellanus’s treatise De Amore (12th century, related to Ovid’s Ars Amandi) and Elective Affinities (1809) in which Goethe also records the British Navy’s practice of inserting a red thread into the ropes of the royal fleet as a distinctive mark—Fil Rouge configures itself as a conceptual device capable of traversing different languages, eras, and practices. It aspires to become a space of relationship and friction, a field of forces where perception and memory, individual experience, and the collective imaginary intertwine.
Understood as a critical and sensitive instrument, capable of activating a conscious gaze and questioning our relationship with images and the world they reflect, the Fil Rouge of this exhibition—an element of continuity that does not imply linearity, but rather a system of mobile connections—constitutes a zone of tension between the visible and the symbolic, between matter and meaning, between thought and its intermissions.
Assuming, by turns, poetic, political, emotional, ritualistic, or corporeal valences, red ceases to be a simple chromatic dimension to become a constant presence, revealing its complex semantic field and drawing a free space of the mind. To this space, no univocal readings are imposed; on the contrary, breaches are opened for a personal (passionate, pulsional) clarification. Ultimately, the viewer—called to autonomously construct their own interpretive path—is the one who completes the meaning of a sign or a gesture that intertwines, knots, and, sometimes, pleasantly, breaks.
Antonello Tolve