Francesco Arena
Il primo giorno della creazione
December 13, 2025 — January 31, 2026
via Carlo Poerio 116
The exhibition has been conceived as a landscape featuring bronze and stone works created over the past year. These pieces were made at different moments but share a common line of research of material, form, and the written word. The sculptures engage with the foundational structures of human thought: the search for the divine, the inevitability of time, dreaming, and creation.
The title of the exhibition, Il primo giorno della creazione, quotes a phrase printed on the cover of one of the early editions of L’Isola di Arturo by Elsa Morante. This book became part of one of the works on display, L’alba, installed on the back wall of the gallery like a stone sun rising on the horizon and illuminating the other works: three bronze sculptures shaped as immediately recognizable objects — a club, an excrement, a stool — placed on the floor like objects created and ultimately abandoned by a human being.
The work The Club is an object made of two halves. It is potentially a weapon or something that calls for veneration, as it hides within it the word “GOD.” It combines play, invention, violence, faith, and idolatry.
The form of The Dream is reminiscent of human excrement coiled upon itself and bears the engraved phrase “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep,” spoken by Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It is something present and instantly recognizable and — just like dreams — belongs to everyone.
Une âme is a bronze cast of a small wooden stool made by Arena’s father, which has accompanied the artist since he was a boy. Like all objects, it carries its own memory and preserves traces of what it has been, the moods of those who handled it, the desire of those who wanted it, or the rejection of those who abandoned it.
At the venue on via Carlo Poerio 110, the work L’altalena, presented at Art Basel Parcours 2025, is also on display.