“The future came out of the past.” Few titles capture Giosetta Fioroni’s artistic vision so well. Her entire body of work stems from this constant movement: retracing her steps in order to transform memories, faces, and fragments of life into something that continues to question and engage us. In her celebrated “Argenti” (Silvers) series, each image seems to belong to an undefined time, like old photographs rediscovered in a drawer. “I paint what I miss,” the artist once said.
In Venice, until August 2, the rooms of the library at ACP – Palazzo Franchetti are hosting the exhibition “The Future Emerged from the Past. Images and Words” (free admission), curated by Alessia Calarota and Giulia Lotti in collaboration with the Goffredo Parise Foundation and Giosetta Fioroni.
After its stop in Bologna at Galleria d’Arte Maggiore g.a.m., the 93-year-old Fioroni returns to Venice, a city that has marked her career since her first Venice Biennale in 1956. The only woman associated with the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo group, Fioroni has always maintained an eccentric position in relation to mainstream Pop Art. While American Pop artists relied on seriality and mechanical reproduction to depict contemporary society, her work remained rooted in a private, narrative, and deeply handcrafted dimension.
At the heart of the exhibition lies her relationship with the written word. The show brings together artists’ books, illustrated editions, book covers, and works born from encounters with writers and poets, from Giorgio Bassani and Alberto Moravia to Antonia Susan Byatt. Naturally, Goffredo Parise—her life companion and privileged interlocutor—is prominently featured through volumes such as Venetian, Venetian-Lagoon Diary and Leisure with Goffredo Parise. Alongside him appear Andrea Zanzotto and Guido Ceronetti.
Particularly noteworthy are the ceramic book-sculptures created at the Bottega Gatti workshop, where text and image leave the page behind to occupy physical space. The exhibition also includes examples of the aforementioned “Argenti.”Works such as A Woman in Silence (1964) and Portrait of a Mother and Daughter bring figures to the surface of the metallic medium like delicate ghosts, suspended between presence and memory. Silver is not merely a technique; it is a form of resistance against oblivion.
The same can be seen in Pieve di Soligo (1970), where the Venetian landscape is traversed by a light that is more mental than real. “Silver is memory; it is the recovery and suspension of different times,” Fioroni says. What emerges is the portrait of an artist who continues to elude definition, a voice that has never stopped looking backward in order to see farther ahead.