curated by Antonella Marino
Orizzonti Arte Contemporanea
Piazzetta Cattedrale, Historical Centre, Ostuni
I don’t know, I really don’t know. Three artists, three open questions about truth and image.
“I know that I know nothing,” said Socrates—and in that phrase, there was no modesty, but clarity. It’s the starting point of philosophy: recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge, questioning accepted truths, remaining open to inquiry. In today’s context, this attitude is more necessary than ever. Knowing that you don’t know isn’t a rejection of knowledge—it’s a rejection of dogma, imposed truth, and stereotyped answers. The exhibition title, I don’t know, I really don’t know, resonates with this tension: not a declaration of surrender, but of vigilance. As Italo Calvino wrote, “lightness is not superficiality, but gliding over things from above.” In the same way, not knowing is not ignorance, but a higher form of attentiveness. It is the beginning of critical thought, and also of every authentic artistic gesture.
The exhibition thus begins with a statement that is both a declaration of crisis and of awareness. A crisis of truth as an objective, universal, irrefutable given. An awareness of truth as a fragile, situated, multiple construction. In the void left by certainties, space opens up for art—particularly painting. Perhaps one of the most complex languages to use today. But precisely because it is a recognized “fiction,” it can become a privileged place for exercising the right not to represent reality (as it has historically done, at least in the West), but to question it, disassemble it, and reformulate it as possibility.
Gianmaria Giannetti, Alessandro Passaro, and Enrico Pantani—three artists close in age but diverse in background and approach—find compelling points of convergence in the unstable territory of a neo-figurative painting that interrogates the meaning of the visible. A light and ironic figuration, in which doubt takes shape through differing yet converging styles: existential and poetic doubt, the open question of what truth is and what can still be called “real”; ironic and social doubt, which disarms the conventions of language; visionary doubt, which imagines other scenarios—even when they are absurd or unsettling. All three challenge the relationship between image and word, appearance and meaning, truth and fiction. Theirs is an active and generative “not knowing” that refuses the illusion of an answer, but never abandons the question.
As Francis Bacon—whom Giannetti likes to quote—once wrote, “painting is a way of coming closer to reality through the fog.” And it is in that very fog that the three artists move: Giannetti excavating the existential dimension; Passaro pushing reality toward the symbolic and the absurd; Pantani exploding the everyday into grotesque narratives. For all of them, truth is not given, but evoked, displaced, enacted. As Jacques Derrida suggests, “there is no truth without the risk of truth. And there is no risk without doubt”.
Gianmaria Giannetti (Milan, 1974) turns to paradox and irony to explore our being in the world with a gaze that is both light and profound. His painting, seemingly playful, is actually traversed by a critical tension conveyed through stylized, dreamlike human, vegetal, and animal figures. Unlikely little beings suspended in an uncertain space, often surrounded by poetic notes and existential questions. “Tell me the truth” reads one painting, at the center of a mesh of erased text from the recent Ghosts and Truths series. Yet the answer remains blurred. The image is a fragile lifeline. The medium itself—at times more rarefied, elsewhere contaminated with photographic inserts and material collages—is continuously called into question, as if the real subject were the very failure of language. And yet, precisely in this fragility, a poetic and philosophical thought opens up, where ultimate questions—human destiny, the meaning of existence—emerge in light, never dogmatic tones, as if truth were always a hypothesis to be pursued with persistence, but without absolute claims.
For Alessandro Passaro (Mesagne, 1974), on the other hand, painting is a device that unmasks visual conventions, deconstructs the logic of power, and exposes the toxicity of today’s mental landscape. His subjects—everyday objects or distorted figures, suspended between the ordinary and the hallucinatory—appear in domestic or natural settings, always disrupted by a semantic short-circuit. Passaro does not aim to unveil a single truth, but to highlight its ambiguities. His images do not denounce or moralize; they destabilize. They move along the lines of the surreal, the grotesque, and the playful. Irony—often bitter—and play become tools to expose the fiction of appearances and probe the symbols of reality. His figures—a scale turned roulette wheel, a giant decontextualized hairdryer, a “contained package,” a woman sitting on a saw blade—seem to come from a disjointed world, where the image does not represent but distorts and disorients. It’s a dry, enigmatic kind of painting, one that plunges into the contradictions of the present and stages a fractured, unstable truth.
In Enrico Pantani’s work (Volterra, 1975) as well, truth is never a comforting statement but an unresolved tension, an ironic gap between gesture and word. His painting, which deliberately adopts a brut/naïve style, becomes a sharp tool for existential investigation and social critique. For this exhibition, Pantani presents a series of small, brightly colored paintings that depict two opposite and yet symmetrical situations: embrace and brawl. Two archetypal gestures, both charged with humanity and ambiguity—where the need for contact can morph into confusion, submission, or violence. Truth, in this pictorial universe, is never clearly stated. Pantani subverts, ironizes, disarms—and in doing so, lays bare the hypocrisies of the everyday. His works, which aspire to communicate with everyone, are like distorted yet deeply human mirrors, revealing reality as an absurd and tragicomic theater. In this context, they function as visual questions: What are we really looking at? And can we truly know—or say—what truth is?
What unites these three artists is not a shared style, but an urgency. The need to question—through painting—what today seems to elude us: truth, reality, and even language itself. All three work on a threshold: they don’t illustrate but evoke. They don’t represent but dismantle. They don’t assert but interrogate.
In an age saturated with assertive narratives—algorithms that tell us what to think, media that decide what is true or false, images that colonize the gaze before thought can form—practicing doubt is a form of resistance to simplification. I don’t know, I really don’t know claims the right to the question. In a world that simplifies, these three artists complicate. In a system that produces reassuring images, they create fragile, ambiguous, open ones. As Donna Haraway writes, “it’s time to tell partial, situated, minor stories.” And in this plurality, this instability, a different kind of truth may emerge: not absolute, but honest. Not definitive, but radical in its uncertainty. Not knowing, then, is not a limitation—it becomes a political gesture, a poetic act, a daily practice of freedom.
Alessandro Passaro, Gianmaria Giannetti, Enrico Pantani
I don’t know, I really don’t know
curated by Antonella Marino
From June 28th to July 18th 2025
Visiting hours:
From Monday to Saturday 10.30 am -2.30 pm and 4.30 pm – 7.30 pm /Sunday morning only
GALLERIA ORIZZONTI ARTE CONTEMPORANEA
Piazzetta Cattedrale (old town) – 72017 Ostuni (BR)
Tel. 0831.335373 – Cell. +39 348 803 2506 info@orizzontiarte.it – www.orizzontiarte.it