Torino Artscape is Artissima’s column highlighting current exhibitions in the city’s leading contemporary art institutions: a regular feature offering a glimpse into the most compelling exhibition programs, curatorial visions, and artistic expressions that animate Turin’s contemporary art scene. Torino Artscape invites you to explore Turin as an essential destination for art lovers, offering inspiration and cultural enrichment throughout the year.
This new episode is dedicated to Associazione Barriera.
A mali rimedi. Pietro Agostoni
Up to 19.04.2026
The dim light of a large room welcomes the visitor into an all-too-intimate setting, where large sheets float, dividing the space in a play of concealment and revelation. These suspended textile surfaces host female bodies, often arranged in choral compositions. They appear as evanescent presences, activated by the slightest movement, responding to the shifts of air produced by those moving through the space. The viewer does not remain external, but enters into direct relation with the works, unwittingly contributing to their ongoing transformation.
A mali rimedi, Pietro Agostoni’s exhibition, presented by Katya Kabalina and Sergey Kantsedal at Associazione Barriera and on view until April 19, stems from a three-month residency and marks a new chapter in the experimentation of his ongoing drawing cycle Ascendo. The works derive from a self-built device that channels candle flames through cones of aluminum foil, allowing soot to settle onto heterogeneous surfaces, often marked by time. The result is an essential, almost primitive practice that combines poor materials and rudimentary procedures, hovering between a vandal-like gesture and a rigorous investigation into the nature of the mark and the element of fire. Agostoni thus develops a personal technique that moves against the grain of.
Here, smoke ceases to be a mere residue and becomes an unstable tool, forcing the artist into constant negotiation with an unruly material. The mark emerges at the threshold, in the friction between gesture and accident, where nothing is fully controllable. The display itself reinforces this sense of precarity: backlit surfaces and mobile supports heighten a constant tension, as if everything were on the verge of giving way. Even breath comes into play—minimal yet decisive—capable of altering the image. What surfaces are fragile yet persistent figures, suspended between appearance and dissolution. In this process, open to the unforeseen, Agostoni relinquishes full control of the gesture, allowing time, air, and combustion to take part in shaping a work that remains alive, and never fully resolved.
Technical Fabrication by ParsimoniaRig
Frames by Alan Stefanato
– Text by Guia Agazzi
