I’d say about 80% comes from press offices: invitations to exhibitions, openings and events announced through photos and press releases that, every time, seem to promise a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Exhibitions not to be missed, projects you absolutely must see, events that, if missed, immediately feel like missed opportunities. And so, yes, a bit of FOMO kicks in. And along with the FOMO comes that recurring doubt: is Florence really the right city to live in, or would Milan be the breeding ground where I should be growing? Because, yes, most of them are all in Milan.

I find myself pondering this question once again as I read yet another message from the head of a well-known press office – to whom I didn’t reply the day before – inviting me to a press preview in two days’ time. Spoiler: I won’t be going. Not because I don’t feel like it, nor because I’m not interested in the project, but simply because I no longer have all the free time I used to have when I was a student.

These days I’m constantly having to make choices. I’d love to do everything – that’s just the sort of person I am – but the reality is that I find myself chasing deadlines and always rushing around. So I’ve started making choices. And that’s also why I decided to launch this column in THE SAUCE, the magazine from Cottura Creativa.

It will be called passenger, because in these pages I will be just an ordinary passenger, and I will try to make you passengers on the journeys I undertake to see exhibitions, museums, institutions and cultural venues with my own eyes. I would like to try, in my own small way, to reverse a rather obvious trend in the world of Italian contemporary art: that of reviews written without having actually seen the exhibitions, based solely on press releases, which in some cases are even copied out in full as articles.

That said, it’s impossible to see everything. Every day I receive between ten and twenty emails containing press kits and press materials, and anyone in this line of work knows that’s just par for the course. That’s why I’ve decided to make a selection and try to share what I see with you in two ways: in written form, for those who enjoy reading a story, here in the magazine; and in video form on our Instagram page, for those who prefer to listen or watch.

I am delighted to kick off this first leg of passenger with Alessandro Piangiamore’s new exhibition at the Repetto Gallery in Lugano, Switzerland, where I was invited by the Piera Cristiani Press Office. It was a meticulously organised press trip and an exhibition that genuinely took me by surprise.

It was my first visit to the Repetto Gallery, a gallery founded in 1967 by Aurelio Repetto and which has always been characterised by an intriguing approach, showcasing both established artists and living contemporary artists. This approach is now consistently upheld by his three sons, following their father’s passing. And it was whilst talking to one of them, Carlo, as we sipped champagne and enjoyed the buffet laid out for us on this press trip, that their desire to support Italian art beyond our country’s borders, offering its artists international visibility, became abundantly clear.

At the heart of the exhibition is the video Te lo prometterò, a title that contains a contradiction. The work lasts one hour and forty-five minutes and is built around a static image that is repeated 56 times, with a slight variation each time. The number 56 corresponds to the number of days between the start of the project and its conclusion. An image of a hand trying to grasp a rainbow with a finger.

The title stems from a personal experience: a phrase uttered by the artist’s son, “I’ll promise you, Dad”, which created a semantic short-circuit. A promise, by its very nature, exists at the moment it is made; shifting it into the future renders it unstable, almost impossible. Te lo prometterò thus becomes a suspended, hypothetical promise, perhaps destined to come true, but never quite within reach. Just like that rainbow.

Perhaps this alone would be enough to give you a sense of the exhibition, which is entitled La polvere ci mostra che la luce esiste. A title that seems to tell us something simple yet incredibly powerful: we need physical, tangible evidence to believe in what we cannot grasp directly. Light, on its own, is often invisible. But the dust it passes through makes it perceptible. And so, for Piangiamore, art seems to become precisely this: an attempt to give form to what normally eludes us, to hold onto the unstable, to make the invisible visible.

This reflection on light, on suspension, and on that opaque zone where things can never be fully understood runs through the entire exhibition. There is a constant link between tension, anticipation and superstition: as if there were always something above us – a presence, a possibility, a threat or a promise – without it ever being entirely clear how it manifests itself. In this sense, Piangiamore’s work takes everything that is ephemeral, fragile and transitory seriously, and attempts to transform it into matter.

Upon entering the gallery, one is immediately drawn to a black island that cuts across the floor. It is Il cacciatore di polvere. A work that commands the space with a silent force. It is a mysterious, impassable island, almost a separate territory. Its black colour makes it all the more enigmatic: it resembles a primordial place, a lunar landscape, an otherworldly realm that both attracts and repels at the same time.

The perimeter of the artwork must not be crossed. And it is precisely this boundary that heightens the desire. After all, this is how islands function in the imagination: they are places that fascinate explorers and sailors precisely because they harbour something that is not fully understood. A treasure, perhaps. Or at least the promise of discovery. Here, at the centre, that desire also centres on the candied fruits encased in glass, which heighten the temptation to cross that black space constructed from volcanic sand and ash from Mount Etna—materials deeply rooted in the artist’s biography, having grown up in Enna with the volcano ever-present on his visual horizon.

I don’t want to make anything up to spice up the story, but I can assure you that the temptation to get too close to that artwork is very real. At one point, a journalist – not some inexperienced young girl, but a seasoned professional – can’t resist and touches the ashes. A tiny gesture, but enough to momentarily disrupt the narrative balance that Piangiamore has created within the space.

I was also deeply struck by the story behind the desire to recreate the process of candying through crystal. Candying, in fact, is a process that preserves what is naturally destined to perish. It is an attempt to steal something from time. And this attempt to crystallise the transitory is one of the central themes of the artist’s work.

These sculptures are entitled Afterlife. The title evokes a conceptual transformation that draws on the tradition of still life, moving towards something different: no longer merely that which is static or lifeless, but that which continues to endure beyond its original life. A survival, a presence that persists. Almost a ghost of matter.

Works such as Il cacciatore di polvere thus introduce a dimension that is both ritualistic and autobiographical. Materials linked to personal experience, such as volcanic soil from Mount Etna, give shape to an impassable space that evokes origins, the island, and childhood, but also an ambivalent state characterised by both attraction and danger.

For this is where Alessandro Piangiamore’s strength lies: in his ability to craft a narrative that weaves together reality and memory, biography and imagination. The sensation I felt whilst in the exhibition was that of a reader stepping into a novel set in Sicily, even though we are actually in Lugano, at the very opposite end of the spectrum. Yet that space manages to transport you elsewhere, into a landscape that is both familiar and mythical, into a space that is mysterious, fascinating and repellent all at once.

Little by little, we are drawn into a story about a father and a son, about a promise that might have been and its impossibility, about a man who keeps searching for a way to reveal what cannot be seen and to give substance to everything that, by definition, slips away. A story permeated by melancholy and a vital tension, by a desire to hold on and an awareness of loss.

This is also the case in the melancholic series Qualche uccello si perde nel cielo, images that evoked in me an ambiguous sense of attraction and suffocation. Looking at them, I wondered: how is it possible to get lost in the very place we associate with the greatest freedom? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that even freedom does not shield us from the risk of disappearing, of dissolving, of passing away.

And it is precisely this transience that binds many of the works on display together. A transience that evokes suspension, suspense and superstition. It is no coincidence that one of the references Piangiamore himself cites for the exhibition is the philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman, author of Accidental Knowledge, and in particular the chapter Dust in Suspension, which also inspired Piangiamore in his choice of the exhibition’s title. Dust, in this sense, is not merely a minute particle: it is what renders visible a presence that would otherwise be imperceptible, what allows light to manifest itself.

This first journey by passenger comes to an end here.

I invite you to go and see for yourselves La polvere ci mostra che la luce esiste by Alessandro Piangiamore, on display at the Repetto Gallery in Lugano until 26 June 2026.