A Past Warmed by Our Eyes
Daniele Capra




A Present with a Burdensome Father
Barbara Pelizzon’s artistic practice is characterised by a profound interest in the past, in memory, and in the traces that time inscribes upon things—not only thematically, but also in terms of the very materials that constitute her works. The artist deliberately avoids using pristine or new materials; instead, she turns to remnants, fragments, and discarded elements, which she assembles or recombines, giving them new life through an additive process of connecting disparate parts. For Pelizzon, the past never truly ceases: it is excessive, infinitely extended, and immanent, like a heavy blanket that enfolds us in its coils, from which we can never fully disentangle ourselves.
In her vision, the present struggles to assert itself in free and autonomous form as a generative father, because it is out of place, condemned to remain the offspring of a material past that seems to hold it captive—according to the principle ex nihilo nihil fit. Her works thus reveal a present that is hybridised, repeatedly manipulated and “contaminated,” ontologically and physically subject to the action of the time that preceded it. It is the outcome of an act of grafting upon something already extant, the mending of a fragment of unknown time of potentially infinite dimension, bequeathed to us and stretching behind our backs, of which we inhabit and experience only a small portion in the present.


Suturing the Edges of a Wound
The attempt to draw together disparate times and distant places through processes of grafting recurs throughout the artist’s work. Her pieces connect our present with those who came before us, evoking the traces they left behind—their footsteps, the warmth of their bodies that departed yet not entirely. Pelizzon probes history through acts of sampling, often arising from chance encounters, and then stitches it back into our own time with its tangible density through simple, minimal gestures that generate sculptural forms. This practice speaks to her desire to reclaim what has been abandoned, layering the flow of our lives upon the flow of the past.
For the artist, each constitutive element of a work is itself the material documentation of a life once lived, the evidence of an existence condensed into a fragment, and transmitted anew to the observer. Materials from disparate origins are recomposed into simple, familiar forms, recalling the objects and furnishings that populate our homes. Pelizzon seems to suggest that these anonymous remnants belong to us, that they are part and origin of our very existence, and must therefore be brought back from the margins into the viewer’s gaze. In this way, she seeks to approximate the edges of a wound torn open by the violent and inexorable advance of history (and of our own individual histories), reminding us through her works that those ruptured margins may, in fact, be reunited—and almost entirely healed.


Outcasts Brought Back to Life
The materials Pelizzon employs are largely drawn from the demolition of buildings, the dismantling of industrial workshops, or the abandonment of old homes. She juxtaposes elements that conceptually retain bodily warmth—what she regards as “warm” materials such as wool, fabric, wood, and rubber—with others that dissipate it, namely “cold” ones such as metal and ceramic. These materials once served specific purposes; although still often recogniable, they have completely lost their original function. They persist as spectral entities, charged with memories and histories that can be only intuited, never fully known, scattered as they are along the tributaries of the past.
They are not “neutral” matter chosen for physical or aesthetic qualities, but rather vehicles of past lives, selected for their expressive resonance and unexpected humanity. Alongside these, she often incorporates actual objects—boxes, dolls, other once-functional items—that are defunctionalised and employed as simple objets trouvés. Her works emerge from the recombination of materials burdened not only by time but also by neglect: water pipes, lead sheets once used by radiologists for protection, mattress wool, and fragments of inner tubes are drawn from the periphery of visibility into the very center of our attention. In so doing, elements once expelled from our world like pariahs are returned by the artist to new life, reabsorbed into the present in unforeseen form.


Empathy Against Oblivion
Pelizzon’s preference for abandoned materials reveals her need—seen through a psychoanalytic lens—to take responsibility for “the least,” for what or who has been consigned to the margins. She engages deeply with the objects she finds, conceiving of them as conceptually and intimately imbued with life, treating them as if they were persons, and thus humanising them. For her, objects abandoned to the chaotic solitude of time are not only the witnesses of past lives and stories, but also creatures to be cared for in the present, so that they may continue to speak as they always once did.
The artist assumes a role of care, like an “emotional mother” adopting and nurturing orphans unexpectedly entrusted to her by chance. She demonstrates a natural, empathetic, and altruistic concern for an object “in distress,” “defeated” or “wounded” by history, responding directly through acts of repair and restitution—moral as much as physical. This disposition takes the form of an unconditional love for what lies beyond the self, a gesture that can also function psychoanalytically as a kind of unconscious self-therapy. Within this generous dedication, one perceives the primordial human desire to resist the inexorable action of time: a silent, obstinate struggle against oblivion, aimed at preventing our traces from being erased and our memories dispersed into dust.

The Works
Daniele Capra, Linda Carello e Guido Comis




Radicamenti consists of a hollow conical–toroidal scrap metal form from which thick woolen cords emerge, created by braiding the stuffing of old mattresses. The work, reminiscent of a flowering tropical plant, extends long open arms that sprawl across the floor, offering themselves entirely to the viewer’s gaze. These woolen extensions, free and knotted in form, recall the root system of a large tree clinging to the forest floor. The piece alludes to personal and collective roots, to history as a foundation that has become ever more necessary in our present condition, marked by uncertainty, dispersion, and unstable liquidity.


Insieme and Contrapposizione are realised by assembling old lead pipes recovered from demolitions, strips of inner tubes, and mattress wool. The elements are suspended within vertical metal parallelepipeds, which both define the maximum spatial volume of the sculptures and highlight their presence in space. Within this “three-dimensional drawing,” the objects, fixed at the top with simple iron wire, are free to oscillate when stirred by air currents. The two works emphasise opposing attitudes: in the first, the homogeneity among the metallic components suggests a rediscovered unity of intent, while in the second, the contrast between materials (the warmth of wool, the coldness of lead) underscores their divergence.


The Imperfetti series consists of thin lead sheets, formerly used in industrial and medical contexts, upon which the artist has painted small white circular elements with a brush. These are like seeds that, when visually combined, generate primary forms such as squares, circles, and rectangles—minimal signs that reveal the desire to reclaim what time has hidden, while leaving upon the metal a trace that speaks also of us, here and now. From the surface of the lead, however, also emerge faces from the museum’s sculptural collections, along with the enlarged imprint of Piero Manzoni’s thumb, nearly one meter in height. The latter is a literal citation of the great Italian artist, alluding more broadly to the capacity of every artist to generate meaning from the very matrix of identity.


Oscilla is composed of about thirty discs, suspended from the ceiling with iron wires and made of lead. On both recto and verso, the discs bear imprints of sculptural faces from the museum’s collection, sometimes alternating with essential white geometric motifs, executed in a technique reminiscent of mosaic decoration. The installation takes inspiration from the ancient oscilla—decorated elements, often with Dionysian or fantastic scenes, suspended in porticoes or hung from trees with a sacred function. The faces evoke the ancient inhabitants of Aquileia, whose portraits, across centuries, often remain the sole documentary evidence of their existence. Pelizzon releases those faces from their original immobility, imposed by marble, rendering them instead dynamic, free to sway at the slightest breath of air.


Illeggibile and Insieme are sculptures marked by the juxtaposition of disparate remnants, held together by rubber or fabric. They are composed of a thin sheet of folded lead on which cuttings of pipes, wool, and fragments of inner tubes are arranged in orderly fashion. The works propose a possible dialogue among objects of different histories and origins, each unexpectedly transmitting a sense of human warmth. In Illeggibile, the lead—seemingly concealing something mysterious—overlaps with a text printed on fabric, rendering it completely incomprehensible. In Insieme, by contrast, it functions as a support and collector of heterogeneous elements.


Otto and Tutti in fila consist respectively of mattress wool braids aligned in rows and metal sheets arranged vertically on the wall with dedicated supports. Brought once more into the centre of our gaze, these fragments appear to recover a role within the present. With a few simple gestures of ordering, Pelizzon seems to contain the chaos generated by the inexorable passing of time. Yet these works also allude to the multitude, equality, and existential diversity of human lives, in which individual stories intermix, resembling one another—though never entirely. In Otto and Tutti in fila the artist recombines human destinies into a coherent form, assigning to each a role, a function, and a dignity.