GALLERIA ORIZZONTI ARTE CONTEMPORANEA

A year after its first public presentation, as a preview at the MIA Photo Fair in Milan, the project PACANOWSKA / PACANOWSKI 1907–1962 – Two Eras, One Dialogue now finds its full exhibition form in the project room of Orizzonti Arte, inaugurating the 2026 season in keeping with a tradition that, in recent years, has established this space as a privileged site for research and experimentation.

The exhibition opens the fourth season of the space dedicated to artistic inquiry and continues the reflections developed over previous years, positioning itself within a clearly defined trajectory as a moment of passage — not only through place and matter, but through time itself, understood as a fluid, porous, and constantly rewritable dimension.

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The work emerges not merely as a declaration of continuity between the art of the past and that of the present, but as an open and conscious dialogue, for which the project room becomes a space of intimate contemplation, where the exchange between Andrea Pacanowski and Felicia Pacanowska unfolds in all its complexity. The works on display are the result of a juxtaposition between painting, drawing, and engraving — artistic media employed by Felicia during the twentieth century — and photography, the medium of her nephew Andrea, internationally recognized in the contemporary art scene for images marked by a strongly painterly quality.

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At the core of the research remains a tension already evident from the outset: a dialogue that is never merely genealogical, but profoundly linguistic. The family bond becomes a critical device, an opportunity to question the very nature of the image and its capacity to traverse eras and expressive codes. The stylistic language of Felicia Pacanowska, rooted in the atmosphere of the École de Paris, encounters the contemporary photographic gaze of her nephew within a hybrid territory where disciplinary boundaries dissolve.

This is not, however, a nostalgic operation nor an exercise in citation. Pacanowski acts upon his aunt’s works as though they were living matter, reactivating their latent potential through a process that is at once interpretation and transformation. Photography thus becomes an instrument of passage: it does not document, but refounds; it does not reproduce, but generates.

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The images are constructed through superimpositions, shifts, and respectful graftings, entering “on tiptoe” into the space — and history — of the older works. In the pieces engaging with figuration, the body enters the pictorial space without visible fracture, as though it had always belonged to that image. In the reinterpretations of abstraction, the gesture becomes freer, almost dissolved, and photography loses every residual trace of referentiality, approaching a purely perceptual dimension.

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It is within this continual oscillation between the recognizable and the undefined that the project finds its strength: a metamorphosis of the image that is never definitive, but always in progress, where time is no longer linear, but a surface upon which images settle, disappear, and re-emerge.

The debut of the project within such an intimate exhibition space marks a fundamental step in its grounding, finding in the project room a dimension more coherent with its introspective and layered nature. The installation does not amplify, but concentrates; it does not spectacularize, but invites a close, almost meditative form of viewing.

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PACANOWSKA / PACANOWSKI thus takes shape as a device of active memory, in which artistic heritage is not merely preserved, but continuously rewritten. A work that questions the very possibility of dialogue between eras, demonstrating how the image, once freed from a linear reading, can become a place of encounter and transformation.

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In this opening of the season, the project room once again confirms itself as a threshold space: a place where art does not merely present itself, but exposes itself in the act of becoming and continuously redefining itself between past and present.