Transparent Architectures
Gabriel Dawe, Dan Graham, Janusz Grünspek, Jeppe Hein, Inside Outside, Robert Irwin, Christina Kubisch, Matteo Negri, Giulio Paolini, Anna Pontel, Jesús-Rafael Soto, Pae White
Villa Manin, Codroipo (IT)
June — November 2025
EssayThe works
Limiti sempre più negoziabili
Daniele Capra
Struggling Between the Measurable and the Infinite
Western civilisation has developed a concept of space in terms of its knowability and measurability: that is, making it one’s own by being able to directly experience it or sample it, and also represent it using geometric and mathematical criteria. The ancient Greeks feared the infinite, a metaphor for the irrational and the uncontrollable. Similarly, from the seventeenth century—when modern science began—philosophers and scientists were troubled by it, to the point that Blaise Pascal wrote in one of his most famous thoughts of being confessed to feeling overwhelmed by the silence of the “eternal spaces” of the universe.
In response to such issues, the idea of defining space through a coordinate method capable of outlining, for example, the position, surface area, or volume of a body placed within it—developed by Descartes and Fermat—can be seen as an attempt to rationalise spatial knowledge through a system of algebraic equations. It’s not just about seeing—observing firsthand—but also about understanding, grasping firmly and incontrovertibly how reality appears before me. However, in the late seventeenth century, precisely due to astronomical discoveries, the ever-dreaded infinite knocked once again, even harder, though seemingly dismissed by rational logic: it became a metaphor, an emblem of the world’s whimsical strangeness, seemingly impossible to contain. At that very historical moment, architecture began to play hide-and-seek with infinity—especially through the immense dimensions of noble estate parks, grand ballrooms and ceremonial halls adorned with rich stucco decorations, and the lavish sparkle of mirrors that shamelessly multiplied light, reflections, and images of the world. Inevitably, the modern man—gazing at the dizzying designs of golden frames, the tree-lined perspectives vanishing into the landscape, or, through a telescope, planets drowned in the immeasurable cosmic silence—remains condemned to wrestle with the same dilemmas and anxieties as ancient man.
The Work and Its Triggers
Many of the works in Transparent Architectures, exhibited in the manor and park of Villa Manin, are heirs to the Baroque tradition rooted in the contrast between the measurable and the infinite. Surprise and wonder are the two streams feeding this lake, nourishing it with ever-new stimuli and phenomenologies. There’s no direct ideological link to the seventeenth and eighteenth-century cultural matrix, but the artists often arrive at similar or comparable results via different paths (involving, in this case, minimalism, perceptual studies, kinetic art, and postmodern architecture). The ‘conceptual tool’ that enables the activation of the work is precisely the friction—planned by the artist—between the measurable finitude of the piece and its ability to engage the countless potentialities of context and its unpredictable variability. The work (a spatially limited factor), the viewer, and the environment (spatially boundless factors) cooperate to define a condition in which borders and limits are extremely difficult to pin down. While the work presents material concentration and physical finiteness easily understood and perceived (the viewer can grasp its dimensions, shape, volume, and material elements), the environment and the spectator are unpredictable variables—especially with sculptural pieces meant to be traversed or walked around. The work is finite matter in waiting; its activation comes from the viewer’s movement and the changing variables of the context. This inevitably leads to a deflagration, whether the piece is placed in a closed anthropised space or, conversely, in an open natural setting.
Transparent Architectures reveals how artists’ interest in surface, line, and physical, chromatic, acoustic, or electric interactions often drives them to develop expressive strategies that question the concept of boundary—as a fixed and insurmountable demarcation line. The use of transparent, translucent, mirrored, or semi-reflective surfaces, minimal volumes, thread, or ‘three-dimensional drawing’ allows for defining portions of space that, in the viewer’s experience, are neither rigid nor inflexible. On the contrary, due to their material nature, these works perceptually challenge the orthodoxy of the boundary, overcoming it through a continuous action of permeability.
Mimetic and Multiplying
(Thinking of Dan Graham, Jeppe Hein, Inside Outside, Robert Irwin, and Matteo Negri)
Transparency is the first tool an artist can use to construct sculptural volumes integrated into an environment, while still allowing details of the context to be perceived. Transparent or translucent materials (semi-opaque, partially retaining light) may be colourless or coloured. Both types allow a piece to be placed without interrupting the context’s original continuity—although in the case of coloured materials, what is seen through the work and the shadow it casts will display an altered colour spectrum.
First used in visual arts in the mid-1960s by French and South American avant-garde artists, transparency has since become a recurring visual tool. It allows the work to act as a zero-additive element in the space: it doesn’t cancel out any part of the environment but integrates into its original extent. Transparent materials, allowing light to pass through, separate physically but not visually. The boundary is barely seen on either side and can be crossed freely with the gaze, making the piece essentially ‘mimetic’, even when it functions like a kaleidoscope transforming reality into shifting light.
Mirrors were widely used in Baroque architecture to fragment the unity of large ceremonial halls. Only in that era did the technical ability—developed in Venice and Paris—to produce large polished glass sheets arise, which, backed with tin foil, enabled full reflection. In the 19th century, industrial processes further expanded their use in ballrooms, theatres, and grand cafés.
The mirror—or reflective surfaces—breaks the artwork’s boundary differently from transparency: rather than blending with the environment, it reflects and replicates parts of the environment and the viewer in unexpected zones of space. These mirrored surfaces multiply entire portions of space, creating new geometries as the observer’s viewpoint shifts. The physical boundary of the piece remains unique and certain, but the reflected part changes continuously, contaminating the work. This ongoing, rhythmic alternation between direct and mirrored reality (including the viewer’s own image) entraps one in a dizzying flux.
Building with Edges, Altering with Threads
(Thinking of Gabriel Dawe, Janusz Grünspek, Anna Pontel)
We are used to thinking of drawing as a technical or expressive tool for exploring and representing reality, developing ideas, or verifying hypotheses. It is often the synthesis of an intuition or desire, anticipating something evolving or being tested. We typically view it as two-dimensional, even when depicting three-dimensional elements through orthogonal projections, axonometry, or perspective. Drawing is both useful and powerful, poetic and technical, expressive and impersonal—it simplifies variables and reveals intentions aimed elsewhere.
However, drawing can unexpectedly assume a sculptural function when its synthetic modes are used to shape a structure defined only by its edges. In this way, it defines space via its outermost boundaries. Rather than being a continuous, full material form, the sculpture becomes an empty three-dimensional drawing—a minimal structure suggesting the spatial volume of an object, furnishing, or house without any physical surface or barrier. With such three-dimensional drawings—made of metal or slender wooden slats—the material vanishes, and the environment is not invaded but simply occupied by a minimal form sketching out its real limits.
This push toward subtlety allows us to imagine the sculptural use of sewing thread, thinner than a tenth of a millimetre. Visible only when used in multiples, threads in tension can create intangible surfaces describing essential geometries occupying space. A delicate hatching, a veil intercepting light and making it shimmer endlessly before our eyes.
Surfaces Seeking Contact and Transforming Identities
(Thinking of Inside Outside, Jesús-Rafael Soto, and Pae White)
A sculpture can be ‘transparent’ because its boundaries—its apparent limits—are not rigid but permeable and deformable, capable of changing depending on environmental variability and the viewer’s presence. The volume, in these cases, is not fixed or stable but reacts to wind, rain, walking bodies, or the accidental movements of children or animals nearby. A work defined by a fluid, shifting boundary—made of materials sensitive to pressure and force—suggests the possibility of a porous boundary, always ready to redefine its identity. A boundary that exists without being imperative, like a formal structure open to negotiation and plurality.
These are works with clearly perceptible identities that nonetheless do not impose a closed syste independent of the “other”—whether the viewer or the context. Their surfaces are deliberately conceived to engage, to suggest that contact and connection are what make humans political beings—and the artwork a continuously transforming organism.
Sound Maps and Devices for Understanding
(Thinking of Christina Kubisch and Giulio Paolini)
Sounds and noises are heard even with eyes closed, even when invisible. They fill our spaces and lives, whether natural or man-made. They form a personal forest shaped by constant interactions between us, our surroundings, and our movements. An invisible, discontinuous architecture defined by our individual sensitivity, within which we often move by chance. It’s like a mute map where borders and boundaries depend on our reading skills and prior knowledge.
A sound sculpture is an anomalous map open to our interactions—yet also an invisible volume: an impalpable mass of sounds interconnected in an open, unpredictable way. Their space becomes our space, their boundary our boundary. And we, too, become authors of that ever-negotiated limit.
Similarly, we are authors—albeit in small part—when we apply systems to the reality before us to read, investigate, and translate it. Between us and the world lies a ‘system’ that enables us to grasp what we observe and render it into image. The visual and spatial information we gather is ordered in our brains through a device—perspective—that we then use to give stable and recognisable structure to distances and proportions. Perspective is like a thin veil through which to gain awareness of reality: both a method and an anomalous sculpture—subtle, sharp, and powerful. To understand the world down to its smallest details, we inevitably need meaningful transparencies.
Daniele Capra
Struggling Between the Measurable and the Infinite
Western civilisation has developed a concept of space in terms of its knowability and measurability: that is, making it one’s own by being able to directly experience it or sample it, and also represent it using geometric and mathematical criteria. The ancient Greeks feared the infinite, a metaphor for the irrational and the uncontrollable. Similarly, from the seventeenth century—when modern science began—philosophers and scientists were troubled by it, to the point that Blaise Pascal wrote in one of his most famous thoughts of being confessed to feeling overwhelmed by the silence of the “eternal spaces” of the universe.
In response to such issues, the idea of defining space through a coordinate method capable of outlining, for example, the position, surface area, or volume of a body placed within it—developed by Descartes and Fermat—can be seen as an attempt to rationalise spatial knowledge through a system of algebraic equations. It’s not just about seeing—observing firsthand—but also about understanding, grasping firmly and incontrovertibly how reality appears before me. However, in the late seventeenth century, precisely due to astronomical discoveries, the ever-dreaded infinite knocked once again, even harder, though seemingly dismissed by rational logic: it became a metaphor, an emblem of the world’s whimsical strangeness, seemingly impossible to contain. At that very historical moment, architecture began to play hide-and-seek with infinity—especially through the immense dimensions of noble estate parks, grand ballrooms and ceremonial halls adorned with rich stucco decorations, and the lavish sparkle of mirrors that shamelessly multiplied light, reflections, and images of the world. Inevitably, the modern man—gazing at the dizzying designs of golden frames, the tree-lined perspectives vanishing into the landscape, or, through a telescope, planets drowned in the immeasurable cosmic silence—remains condemned to wrestle with the same dilemmas and anxieties as ancient man.
The Work and Its Triggers
Many of the works in Transparent Architectures, exhibited in the manor and park of Villa Manin, are heirs to the Baroque tradition rooted in the contrast between the measurable and the infinite. Surprise and wonder are the two streams feeding this lake, nourishing it with ever-new stimuli and phenomenologies. There’s no direct ideological link to the seventeenth and eighteenth-century cultural matrix, but the artists often arrive at similar or comparable results via different paths (involving, in this case, minimalism, perceptual studies, kinetic art, and postmodern architecture). The ‘conceptual tool’ that enables the activation of the work is precisely the friction—planned by the artist—between the measurable finitude of the piece and its ability to engage the countless potentialities of context and its unpredictable variability. The work (a spatially limited factor), the viewer, and the environment (spatially boundless factors) cooperate to define a condition in which borders and limits are extremely difficult to pin down. While the work presents material concentration and physical finiteness easily understood and perceived (the viewer can grasp its dimensions, shape, volume, and material elements), the environment and the spectator are unpredictable variables—especially with sculptural pieces meant to be traversed or walked around. The work is finite matter in waiting; its activation comes from the viewer’s movement and the changing variables of the context. This inevitably leads to a deflagration, whether the piece is placed in a closed anthropised space or, conversely, in an open natural setting.
Transparent Architectures reveals how artists’ interest in surface, line, and physical, chromatic, acoustic, or electric interactions often drives them to develop expressive strategies that question the concept of boundary—as a fixed and insurmountable demarcation line. The use of transparent, translucent, mirrored, or semi-reflective surfaces, minimal volumes, thread, or ‘three-dimensional drawing’ allows for defining portions of space that, in the viewer’s experience, are neither rigid nor inflexible. On the contrary, due to their material nature, these works perceptually challenge the orthodoxy of the boundary, overcoming it through a continuous action of permeability.
Mimetic and Multiplying
(Thinking of Dan Graham, Jeppe Hein, Inside Outside, Robert Irwin, and Matteo Negri)
Transparency is the first tool an artist can use to construct sculptural volumes integrated into an environment, while still allowing details of the context to be perceived. Transparent or translucent materials (semi-opaque, partially retaining light) may be colourless or coloured. Both types allow a piece to be placed without interrupting the context’s original continuity—although in the case of coloured materials, what is seen through the work and the shadow it casts will display an altered colour spectrum.
First used in visual arts in the mid-1960s by French and South American avant-garde artists, transparency has since become a recurring visual tool. It allows the work to act as a zero-additive element in the space: it doesn’t cancel out any part of the environment but integrates into its original extent. Transparent materials, allowing light to pass through, separate physically but not visually. The boundary is barely seen on either side and can be crossed freely with the gaze, making the piece essentially ‘mimetic’, even when it functions like a kaleidoscope transforming reality into shifting light.
Mirrors were widely used in Baroque architecture to fragment the unity of large ceremonial halls. Only in that era did the technical ability—developed in Venice and Paris—to produce large polished glass sheets arise, which, backed with tin foil, enabled full reflection. In the 19th century, industrial processes further expanded their use in ballrooms, theatres, and grand cafés.
The mirror—or reflective surfaces—breaks the artwork’s boundary differently from transparency: rather than blending with the environment, it reflects and replicates parts of the environment and the viewer in unexpected zones of space. These mirrored surfaces multiply entire portions of space, creating new geometries as the observer’s viewpoint shifts. The physical boundary of the piece remains unique and certain, but the reflected part changes continuously, contaminating the work. This ongoing, rhythmic alternation between direct and mirrored reality (including the viewer’s own image) entraps one in a dizzying flux.
Building with Edges, Altering with Threads
(Thinking of Gabriel Dawe, Janusz Grünspek, Anna Pontel)
We are used to thinking of drawing as a technical or expressive tool for exploring and representing reality, developing ideas, or verifying hypotheses. It is often the synthesis of an intuition or desire, anticipating something evolving or being tested. We typically view it as two-dimensional, even when depicting three-dimensional elements through orthogonal projections, axonometry, or perspective. Drawing is both useful and powerful, poetic and technical, expressive and impersonal—it simplifies variables and reveals intentions aimed elsewhere.
However, drawing can unexpectedly assume a sculptural function when its synthetic modes are used to shape a structure defined only by its edges. In this way, it defines space via its outermost boundaries. Rather than being a continuous, full material form, the sculpture becomes an empty three-dimensional drawing—a minimal structure suggesting the spatial volume of an object, furnishing, or house without any physical surface or barrier. With such three-dimensional drawings—made of metal or slender wooden slats—the material vanishes, and the environment is not invaded but simply occupied by a minimal form sketching out its real limits.
This push toward subtlety allows us to imagine the sculptural use of sewing thread, thinner than a tenth of a millimetre. Visible only when used in multiples, threads in tension can create intangible surfaces describing essential geometries occupying space. A delicate hatching, a veil intercepting light and making it shimmer endlessly before our eyes.
Surfaces Seeking Contact and Transforming Identities
(Thinking of Inside Outside, Jesús-Rafael Soto, and Pae White)
A sculpture can be ‘transparent’ because its boundaries—its apparent limits—are not rigid but permeable and deformable, capable of changing depending on environmental variability and the viewer’s presence. The volume, in these cases, is not fixed or stable but reacts to wind, rain, walking bodies, or the accidental movements of children or animals nearby. A work defined by a fluid, shifting boundary—made of materials sensitive to pressure and force—suggests the possibility of a porous boundary, always ready to redefine its identity. A boundary that exists without being imperative, like a formal structure open to negotiation and plurality.
These are works with clearly perceptible identities that nonetheless do not impose a closed syste independent of the “other”—whether the viewer or the context. Their surfaces are deliberately conceived to engage, to suggest that contact and connection are what make humans political beings—and the artwork a continuously transforming organism.
Sound Maps and Devices for Understanding
(Thinking of Christina Kubisch and Giulio Paolini)
Sounds and noises are heard even with eyes closed, even when invisible. They fill our spaces and lives, whether natural or man-made. They form a personal forest shaped by constant interactions between us, our surroundings, and our movements. An invisible, discontinuous architecture defined by our individual sensitivity, within which we often move by chance. It’s like a mute map where borders and boundaries depend on our reading skills and prior knowledge.
A sound sculpture is an anomalous map open to our interactions—yet also an invisible volume: an impalpable mass of sounds interconnected in an open, unpredictable way. Their space becomes our space, their boundary our boundary. And we, too, become authors of that ever-negotiated limit.
Similarly, we are authors—albeit in small part—when we apply systems to the reality before us to read, investigate, and translate it. Between us and the world lies a ‘system’ that enables us to grasp what we observe and render it into image. The visual and spatial information we gather is ordered in our brains through a device—perspective—that we then use to give stable and recognisable structure to distances and proportions. Perspective is like a thin veil through which to gain awareness of reality: both a method and an anomalous sculpture—subtle, sharp, and powerful. To understand the world down to its smallest details, we inevitably need meaningful transparencies.
The works
Daniele Capra, Linda Carello e Guido Comis
Inside Outside, Welcome!, 2025
Inside Outside’s research merges architecture, landscape interventions, and design, making use of diverse materials capable of transforming and modulating environments. Their installations are marked by an innovative use of light, movement and transparency, with the aim of blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior, private and public spaces.
The installation Welcome!, positioned along the arcade leading to the villa’s entrance, compels visitors to follow a zigzag path around voile curtains suspended between the columns and the wall. The fabric, printed with stylised architectural motifs that echo the design of the entrance colonnade, disrupts the clear perspective of the arcade, multiplies the rhythmically spaced arches, and creates spaces that are neither entirely open nor fully enclosed.
But Welcome! is also an invitation to reflect on how we inhabit and traverse spaces today, in a society where architectural transparency— far from being solely a symbol of openness—can also suggest a condition of constant exposure.
The semi-transparent curtains both conceal and reveal, suggesting an ambiguous interplay between visibility and control. Through the repetition and fragmentation of the colonnade, Welcome! transforms the building’s perspectives into a labyrinth and inverts the purpose of the perspective illusions that characterise the Manin residence. Whereas the Rooms of Perspectives of the villa aim to expand interior space through visual illusion, here distances are contradicted, and the gaze is prevented from roaming freely.
Gabriel Dawe, Plexus n. 46, 2025
Gabriel Dawe is a Mexican-born artist known for his installations composed of colored threads that transform architectural space into immersive environments of light and colour. His Plexus series explores the relationship between the body, space, and cultural identity. Drawing from Mexico’s rich textile traditions, Dawe merges them with a conceptual aesthetic and a mathematically-driven minimalist approach.
Plexus is a Latin term referring to a complex network, often used in anatomical contexts to describe interwoven systems of nerves or blood vessels. Dawe adopts this term to evoke immaterial structures composed of energy, colour and light. His works, made with thousands of embroidery threads stretched across walls, ceilings, or columns, generate iridescent gradients reminiscent of prismatic light or the spectrum of a rainbow.
The series also acts as a reflection on the construction of gender identity and challenges stereotypes associated with masculinity. The use of colour—often inspired by the rainbow flag—emphasises an affiliation with themes related to the LGBT community.
In Plexus n. 46, the taut threads form an ephemeral structure suspended between sculpture and painting: visible yet intangible. The work alters spatial perception, appearing solid from a distance but vanishing as the viewer approaches. Monumental and ethereal, it invites a reconsideration of architecture as a porous space, where vision becomes emotionally charged.
Robert Irwin, Multiple Configurations #1, 2018
At the heart of practice of Robert Irwin—a prominent figure in the Light and Space movement that emerged in California in the 1960s and ’70s—is a perceptual investigation of light and its spatial and atmospheric effects. Irwin does not conceive of the artwork as a finished object, but rather as an experience, a process and a constantly evolving sensory condition.
In Multiple Configurations #1 the artist focuses on the effects of light on vertical sheets of coloured transparent plexiglass. The work is composed of elements over three meters tall, with L-, T-, and cross-shaped bases arranged in a precise geometric configuration inscribed within a rectangular space. Irwin references the aesthetics of modern glass architecture, yet subverts its constructive function by turning it into a purely optical experience.
Installed near the villa’s southern windows, Multiple Configurations #1 is activated by natural light: it responds to the passing hours of the day, refracts, filters, and modulates sunlight in a continuous chromatic metamorphosis. The plexiglass transparency does not serve to divide or define space, but rather to render it unstable, blurred, and shimmering.
In contrast with the rationality of its structure, the work generates intangible, atmospheric effects of light that engage the surrounding environment—ultimately making it part of the creation itself.
Jeppe Hein, Geometric Mirrors X, 2019
Jeppe Hein draws from conceptual art and minimalist forms to create works that actively engage the viewer’s participation. His artistic language is rooted in the interaction between artwork and spectator, aiming to dissolve the traditional distance between observer and the object of observation. For Hein, art is not a passive experience to be consumed, but a dynamic process—one that can spark reflection, emotion, and connection.
Often, as in Geometric Mirror X, the artist employs reflective materials, mirrored surfaces and geometric structures to evoke a sensory and emotional response. The work generates a visual and relational short-circuit: it confuses those near with those beyond the object, blurs the distinction between what is reflected and what is seen through its openings, creating a continuous interplay between the visible and the invisible, between the self and the other.
Within the context of the villa—marked by its frequent use of illusionistic decoration, such as frescoed trompe-l’oeil rooms or the tent room with protruding stucco elements—Geometric Mirror X becomes a contemporary update of the 18th-century Manin residence’s fascination with visual wonder. The space occupied by the artwork transforms into a site of encounter and play, but also of awareness: Geometric Mirror X reflects bodies, movements, and gazes, linking them together. The room where the work is displayed becomes a theatre of human relationships, inviting reflection on how we inhabit space and connect with others.
Janusz Grünspek, Drawings in Space, 2009-2010
Janusz Grünspek works at the boundary between sculpture and drawing, translating everyday objects into light and essential structures. With his Drawings in Space series, the artist reconstructs familiar forms—chairs, computers, tables, utensils—using slender wood sticks that evoke three-dimensional drawings suspended in space. The works in this series hover between the visible and the invisible, between idea and matter. The objects appear real yet ephemeral, like ghostly apparitions of the things we know.
In the context of the exhibition Transparent Architectures, these “minimal architectures” reveal the skeletal structure of things, hollowing out their form and leaving behind only a trace, an outline, a possibility. The viewers mentally complete the volumes they observe: the shapes are constructed more through absence than presence, caught in a tension between what is shown and what is suggested. Through what resemble three-dimensional X-rays, Grünspek seems to lay bare the complexity of objects and, by peering beneath their surface, to ironically expose their inner workings—whether simple, like chairs, or sophisticated, like computers.
Inside Outside, …to the sixth dimension, 2025
If Welcome! by Inside Outside operated through lightness, transparency, and movement—inviting a bodily and reflective journey along the architectural margins—…to the sixth dimension celebrates the monumentality of the interior space and heightens its perception through a fully mirrored floor.
As the title suggests, the work opens both the gaze and the senses to an additional dimension—one that cannot be defined by conventional spatial coordinates. Walking across the reflective surface, the visitor experiences the sensation of floating between two domes: the real one overhead and a virtual one beneath their feet. The perfect symmetry of the reflection doubles the space, producing a dizzying effect of depth and suspension. Architectural details often overlooked—such as stucco decorations, the balcony, and the entire structure of the vault—are returned to view with new prominence, as if to underscore the need to re-educate perception.
While Welcome! disrupted the linear perspective of the arcade, fragmenting and obscuring vision through shifting veils and uncertain movement, …to the sixth dimension restores an almost cosmic unity to the central space of the villa. Both works challenge the notions of inside and outside, visible and invisible, real and reflected. Together, they imbue the architectural experience of the 18th-century residence with new meaning—not merely as a historical testimony, but as a dynamic environment to be traversed with body and gaze, balancing precariously between orientation and disorientation, between welcome and bewilderment.
Matteo Negri, Piano Piano Bellagio, 2025
Piano Piano Bellagio is part of a series of works that Matteo Negri started working on in 2017. They were inspired by the desire to explore the concepts of threshold, passage, and perception through essential forms and industrial materials. The works in this series are based on the intersection of two non-orthogonal planes—glass and metal—positioned on the ground and self-supporting. In Piano Piano Bellagio, created specifically for the exhibition, the glass sheet is coated with dichroic films that alter colour and reflection depending on the viewer’s position and the angle of the light.
The work functions as a perceptual device: it divides space into asymmetrical portions and fragments it into shifting reflections, compelling the viewer to move around it to perceive its variations. The transparent and mirrored surfaces return a visually mutable image of the context, breaking it apart like a kaleidoscope.
Negri thus transforms a pure geometric form into a dynamic experience, in which the observer becomes an active participant in a visual game that contaminates and redraws the surrounding space.
Giulio Paolini, Contemplator enim, 1992
A central figure in Italian conceptual art, Giulio Paolini focuses his work on the mechanisms of artistic representation, placing the very act of seeing and creating at the core of his inquiry.
Contemplator enim is composed of plexiglas panels arranged to form a folding screen, rhythmically marked by incised outlines of classical columns. At each end of the work, two valets in 18th-century attire hold empty frames, suggesting the absence of the image and prompting the viewer to reflect on the meaning of vision. The transparency of the material and the rectangular openings in the panels—reminiscent of missing canvases in a picture gallery—enhance the sense of emptiness and anticipation.
The title of the work, drawn from Lucretius’ De rerum natura, refers to the contemplation of the invisible motions of matter, underscoring the tension between what is seen and what escapes perception. In Contemplator enim, Paolini stages the illusion of representation: the image withheld from view offers a glimpse of reality, transforming the work into a genuine window rather than a mere pictorial illusion.
The figure of the valet, a recurring motif in Paolini’s visual lexicon, embodies the silent servant of the artistic scene—the one who opens and closes the curtain on representation without ever becoming its main character. In this installation, the valet becomes a symbol of the artist’s presence and absence: a stand-in for the creator who withdraws to leave space for the work and the viewer.
Pae White, In Love with Tomorrow, 2012
Pae White’s practice moves fluidly between visual art, design, and architecture, dissolving the boundaries between them through the use of ephemeral materials such as paper, thread, and textiles. Her works transform everyday objects into suspended visions, poetically transfiguring them to reveal the hidden potential of fragile and transitory matter. The tension between lightness and complexity is a constant in her poetics, which revolves around themes of time, waiting and impermanence.
In Love with Tomorrow is an installation composed entirely of paper and thread, appearing as a large body suspended in space. Despite its lightness, the work asserts itself through visual force and architectural impact. The individual elements, arranged according to a precise geometric order, delineate an evanescent yet structured form that enters into dialogue with the surrounding environment.
The title—In Love with Tomorrow—evokes an emotional projection toward the future, a leap of trust and imagination. In sharp contrast with the fragility of its materials, the work invites reflection on the transience of things and the urgency of experiencing the present before it vanishes.
Within the exhibition Transparent Architectures, the work takes on additional meaning: it is not only a sculpture, but a perceptual environment, a mental space, a suspended architecture. It opens a passage into an emotional and contemplative dimension where transparency is not only a material quality, but also a symbolic one—an invitation to see beyond, to imagine what is not yet there.
Christina Kubisch, La serra, 2017-2025
La serra (“The Greenhouse”) by Christina Kubisch is a sound installation that interweaves music, visual art, and spatial perception, continuing the artist’s decades-long exploration of the relationships between sound, technology and the environment. The work is poetically inspired by the structure of greenhouses—spaces where nature is cultivated and managed collaboratively—but subverts their usual contents, replacing plants and flowers with invisible sound flows travelling through suspended wires, yellow and green like vegetal stems.
Within this forest, visitors are invited to move through the space wearing magnetic induction headphones, the only means through which the sounds can be heard. The audio tracks transmitted through the cables combine recordings of natural sounds (birdsongs, wind, rain) with noises generated by artificial devices such as computers, routers, and lights. The result is a hybrid, layered soundscape that shifts based on the visitor’s position and movement—making the body an active part of the system.
La serra is a space for individual listening, but also for collective experience. Moreover the work evokes the subtle boundary between the natural and the technological. In dialogue with other installations in the exhibition that emphasise the physical experience of space, Kubisch offers a form of sonic habitat in which nature is already filtered through culture, and where art becomes a tool for perceptual awareness.
Anna Pontel, Corpo inclinato, 2025
Through her work, Anna Pontel explores the relationship between space, perception, and identity. Corpo inclinato (Inclined Body) is a life-sized reproduction—rendered with an essential metal structure— of the layout of the apartment where the artist spent the lockdown period during the Covid-19 pandemic. Resting on a piece of furniture, the structure appears unstable and provisional, evoking the sense of suspension that defined those months.
Pontel constructs a walkable three-dimensional drawing, inviting viewers to physically immerse themselves in the volumes and layout of the domestic environment. The body thus becomes the measure and point of comparison for a space that is both personal and symbolic. The theme of the home—not just as a physical place, but as a container of experiences and habits—is central to her reflection, in keeping with the artist’s enduring interest in the forms of everyday life and their capacity for transformation.
In dialogue with the room in which it is installed, Corpo inclinato contrasts its empty, transparent outline with the painted architectural trompe-l’oeil on the surrounding walls: on one side, lived reality reduced to its essentials; on the other, pictorial illusion, fixed and deceptive. This interplay of contrasts—a recurring hallmark of Pontel’s work—challenges what is seen and what remains, navigating the tensions between memory, space, and presence.
Jeppe Hein, Double Ellipse, 2025
The works by Jeppe Hein exhibited at Villa Manin, Geometric Mirror X and Double Ellipse, are grounded in a shared poetics: the interaction between artwork, viewer, and context. Moving between conceptual art and minimalism, Hein employs geometric forms and reflective materials to provoke an active, conscious engagement from the public. His installations are never mere objects of contemplation, but perceptual and relational devices that invite play, wonder, and reflection.
Double Ellipse consists of two sets of mirror-polished metal steles of varying heights, arranged to form intersecting arcs. The work creates a walkable structure with two opposing entrances: a kind of transparent labyrinth that blurs image and reflection, reality and illusion. Visitors move through it as if in a fluid space—their images fragment, merge with the landscape and with other bodies, as real and mirrored glimpses alternate in a visual flow that recalls cinema.
As in Geometric Mirror X which refracts and multiplies perspectives within the villa, Double Ellipse also transforms space into an unstable, shared field of experience. The disorientation Hein creates is not physical, but mental. In a world where the relationship between individual and space is often mediated by digital devices and systems of control, Hein’s works offer a direct, sensory encounter—where every step, every gaze, every interaction becomes part of the artwork itself.
Jesús Rafael Soto, Pénétrable BBL Bleu, 1999
Jesús Rafael Soto was one of the leading figures of 20th-century kinetic and optical art. After an early education in Latin America, he moved to Paris, where he developed an artistic practice centred on movement, perception and interaction with the viewer. His work straddles the border between painting and sculpture, merging them into installations that exist through continuous change, activated by light, bodily movement and by the act of seeing.
His visual language employs simple materials—nylon threads, metal rods, transparent surfaces—to create structures that seem to dissolve into space, challenging the idea of the artwork as a fixed, immutable object.
Pénétrable BBL Bleu, composed of hundreds of suspended thin blue PVC tubes, generates a transparent, penetrable volume that invites the viewer to walk through it. The experience is not only visual: moving through this artificial forest activates tactile, auditory, and kinesthetic perception, establishing a direct relationship between body, space, and material.
Installed in the historic park of Villa Manin, the work enters into dialogue with the natural environment. The thin tubes sway gently in the wind, evoking the behavior of reeds or branches, while at the same time contrasting with organic elements through their artificial color and essential geometry. In this way, Soto’s intervention both echoes and contradicts the landscape that hosts it.
Dan Graham, Two-way Mirror Pavilion, 1998
Dan Graham is one of the most influential figures in American art of the late twentieth century, known for a cross-disciplinary approach that fused visual art, architecture, and critical theory. Central to his work is a reflection on space as a perceptual and relational construct. Themes such as reflection, the double, transparency, the boundary between public and private and the interaction between viewer and artwork run throughout his practice.
Two-way Mirror Pavilion, installed for the first time on the occasion of this exhibition, belongs to the series of Pavilions—walkable structures Graham began developing in the 1980s. Inspired by minimalism, urban architecture, and public park pavilions, these works are designed as spaces for experience and observation. The sculpture consists of two concentric triangular prisms made of metal and wood. Some of its sides consist of semi-reflective mirrors and others by regular grid panels, creating a constant interplay of opacity, reflection, and transparency.
The use of two-way mirror—which allows what lies behind the surface to coexist with the reflection of what stands before it—generates an ambiguous, fluid perceptual condition. Graham also draws from the Japanese tradition of shōji—sliding paper and wood panels that filter light and create flexible spatial boundaries. As with shōji, in the Pavilions the separation between interior and exterior is not determined, but dependent on gaze and movement.
The work introduces a critical reflection on perception, identity, while the act of looking becomes a tool for awareness: as we observe, we are observed; as we search for a fixed point, our point of view multiplies.
Daniele Capra, Linda Carello e Guido Comis
Inside Outside, Welcome!, 2025
Inside Outside’s research merges architecture, landscape interventions, and design, making use of diverse materials capable of transforming and modulating environments. Their installations are marked by an innovative use of light, movement and transparency, with the aim of blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior, private and public spaces.
The installation Welcome!, positioned along the arcade leading to the villa’s entrance, compels visitors to follow a zigzag path around voile curtains suspended between the columns and the wall. The fabric, printed with stylised architectural motifs that echo the design of the entrance colonnade, disrupts the clear perspective of the arcade, multiplies the rhythmically spaced arches, and creates spaces that are neither entirely open nor fully enclosed.
But Welcome! is also an invitation to reflect on how we inhabit and traverse spaces today, in a society where architectural transparency— far from being solely a symbol of openness—can also suggest a condition of constant exposure.
The semi-transparent curtains both conceal and reveal, suggesting an ambiguous interplay between visibility and control. Through the repetition and fragmentation of the colonnade, Welcome! transforms the building’s perspectives into a labyrinth and inverts the purpose of the perspective illusions that characterise the Manin residence. Whereas the Rooms of Perspectives of the villa aim to expand interior space through visual illusion, here distances are contradicted, and the gaze is prevented from roaming freely.
Gabriel Dawe, Plexus n. 46, 2025
Gabriel Dawe is a Mexican-born artist known for his installations composed of colored threads that transform architectural space into immersive environments of light and colour. His Plexus series explores the relationship between the body, space, and cultural identity. Drawing from Mexico’s rich textile traditions, Dawe merges them with a conceptual aesthetic and a mathematically-driven minimalist approach.
Plexus is a Latin term referring to a complex network, often used in anatomical contexts to describe interwoven systems of nerves or blood vessels. Dawe adopts this term to evoke immaterial structures composed of energy, colour and light. His works, made with thousands of embroidery threads stretched across walls, ceilings, or columns, generate iridescent gradients reminiscent of prismatic light or the spectrum of a rainbow.
The series also acts as a reflection on the construction of gender identity and challenges stereotypes associated with masculinity. The use of colour—often inspired by the rainbow flag—emphasises an affiliation with themes related to the LGBT community.
In Plexus n. 46, the taut threads form an ephemeral structure suspended between sculpture and painting: visible yet intangible. The work alters spatial perception, appearing solid from a distance but vanishing as the viewer approaches. Monumental and ethereal, it invites a reconsideration of architecture as a porous space, where vision becomes emotionally charged.
Robert Irwin, Multiple Configurations #1, 2018
At the heart of practice of Robert Irwin—a prominent figure in the Light and Space movement that emerged in California in the 1960s and ’70s—is a perceptual investigation of light and its spatial and atmospheric effects. Irwin does not conceive of the artwork as a finished object, but rather as an experience, a process and a constantly evolving sensory condition.
In Multiple Configurations #1 the artist focuses on the effects of light on vertical sheets of coloured transparent plexiglass. The work is composed of elements over three meters tall, with L-, T-, and cross-shaped bases arranged in a precise geometric configuration inscribed within a rectangular space. Irwin references the aesthetics of modern glass architecture, yet subverts its constructive function by turning it into a purely optical experience.
Installed near the villa’s southern windows, Multiple Configurations #1 is activated by natural light: it responds to the passing hours of the day, refracts, filters, and modulates sunlight in a continuous chromatic metamorphosis. The plexiglass transparency does not serve to divide or define space, but rather to render it unstable, blurred, and shimmering.
In contrast with the rationality of its structure, the work generates intangible, atmospheric effects of light that engage the surrounding environment—ultimately making it part of the creation itself.
Jeppe Hein, Geometric Mirrors X, 2019
Jeppe Hein draws from conceptual art and minimalist forms to create works that actively engage the viewer’s participation. His artistic language is rooted in the interaction between artwork and spectator, aiming to dissolve the traditional distance between observer and the object of observation. For Hein, art is not a passive experience to be consumed, but a dynamic process—one that can spark reflection, emotion, and connection.
Often, as in Geometric Mirror X, the artist employs reflective materials, mirrored surfaces and geometric structures to evoke a sensory and emotional response. The work generates a visual and relational short-circuit: it confuses those near with those beyond the object, blurs the distinction between what is reflected and what is seen through its openings, creating a continuous interplay between the visible and the invisible, between the self and the other.
Within the context of the villa—marked by its frequent use of illusionistic decoration, such as frescoed trompe-l’oeil rooms or the tent room with protruding stucco elements—Geometric Mirror X becomes a contemporary update of the 18th-century Manin residence’s fascination with visual wonder. The space occupied by the artwork transforms into a site of encounter and play, but also of awareness: Geometric Mirror X reflects bodies, movements, and gazes, linking them together. The room where the work is displayed becomes a theatre of human relationships, inviting reflection on how we inhabit space and connect with others.
Janusz Grünspek, Drawings in Space, 2009-2010
Janusz Grünspek works at the boundary between sculpture and drawing, translating everyday objects into light and essential structures. With his Drawings in Space series, the artist reconstructs familiar forms—chairs, computers, tables, utensils—using slender wood sticks that evoke three-dimensional drawings suspended in space. The works in this series hover between the visible and the invisible, between idea and matter. The objects appear real yet ephemeral, like ghostly apparitions of the things we know.
In the context of the exhibition Transparent Architectures, these “minimal architectures” reveal the skeletal structure of things, hollowing out their form and leaving behind only a trace, an outline, a possibility. The viewers mentally complete the volumes they observe: the shapes are constructed more through absence than presence, caught in a tension between what is shown and what is suggested. Through what resemble three-dimensional X-rays, Grünspek seems to lay bare the complexity of objects and, by peering beneath their surface, to ironically expose their inner workings—whether simple, like chairs, or sophisticated, like computers.
Inside Outside, …to the sixth dimension, 2025
If Welcome! by Inside Outside operated through lightness, transparency, and movement—inviting a bodily and reflective journey along the architectural margins—…to the sixth dimension celebrates the monumentality of the interior space and heightens its perception through a fully mirrored floor.
As the title suggests, the work opens both the gaze and the senses to an additional dimension—one that cannot be defined by conventional spatial coordinates. Walking across the reflective surface, the visitor experiences the sensation of floating between two domes: the real one overhead and a virtual one beneath their feet. The perfect symmetry of the reflection doubles the space, producing a dizzying effect of depth and suspension. Architectural details often overlooked—such as stucco decorations, the balcony, and the entire structure of the vault—are returned to view with new prominence, as if to underscore the need to re-educate perception.
While Welcome! disrupted the linear perspective of the arcade, fragmenting and obscuring vision through shifting veils and uncertain movement, …to the sixth dimension restores an almost cosmic unity to the central space of the villa. Both works challenge the notions of inside and outside, visible and invisible, real and reflected. Together, they imbue the architectural experience of the 18th-century residence with new meaning—not merely as a historical testimony, but as a dynamic environment to be traversed with body and gaze, balancing precariously between orientation and disorientation, between welcome and bewilderment.
Matteo Negri, Piano Piano Bellagio, 2025
Piano Piano Bellagio is part of a series of works that Matteo Negri started working on in 2017. They were inspired by the desire to explore the concepts of threshold, passage, and perception through essential forms and industrial materials. The works in this series are based on the intersection of two non-orthogonal planes—glass and metal—positioned on the ground and self-supporting. In Piano Piano Bellagio, created specifically for the exhibition, the glass sheet is coated with dichroic films that alter colour and reflection depending on the viewer’s position and the angle of the light.
The work functions as a perceptual device: it divides space into asymmetrical portions and fragments it into shifting reflections, compelling the viewer to move around it to perceive its variations. The transparent and mirrored surfaces return a visually mutable image of the context, breaking it apart like a kaleidoscope.
Negri thus transforms a pure geometric form into a dynamic experience, in which the observer becomes an active participant in a visual game that contaminates and redraws the surrounding space.
Giulio Paolini, Contemplator enim, 1992
A central figure in Italian conceptual art, Giulio Paolini focuses his work on the mechanisms of artistic representation, placing the very act of seeing and creating at the core of his inquiry.
Contemplator enim is composed of plexiglas panels arranged to form a folding screen, rhythmically marked by incised outlines of classical columns. At each end of the work, two valets in 18th-century attire hold empty frames, suggesting the absence of the image and prompting the viewer to reflect on the meaning of vision. The transparency of the material and the rectangular openings in the panels—reminiscent of missing canvases in a picture gallery—enhance the sense of emptiness and anticipation.
The title of the work, drawn from Lucretius’ De rerum natura, refers to the contemplation of the invisible motions of matter, underscoring the tension between what is seen and what escapes perception. In Contemplator enim, Paolini stages the illusion of representation: the image withheld from view offers a glimpse of reality, transforming the work into a genuine window rather than a mere pictorial illusion.
The figure of the valet, a recurring motif in Paolini’s visual lexicon, embodies the silent servant of the artistic scene—the one who opens and closes the curtain on representation without ever becoming its main character. In this installation, the valet becomes a symbol of the artist’s presence and absence: a stand-in for the creator who withdraws to leave space for the work and the viewer.
Pae White, In Love with Tomorrow, 2012
Pae White’s practice moves fluidly between visual art, design, and architecture, dissolving the boundaries between them through the use of ephemeral materials such as paper, thread, and textiles. Her works transform everyday objects into suspended visions, poetically transfiguring them to reveal the hidden potential of fragile and transitory matter. The tension between lightness and complexity is a constant in her poetics, which revolves around themes of time, waiting and impermanence.
In Love with Tomorrow is an installation composed entirely of paper and thread, appearing as a large body suspended in space. Despite its lightness, the work asserts itself through visual force and architectural impact. The individual elements, arranged according to a precise geometric order, delineate an evanescent yet structured form that enters into dialogue with the surrounding environment.
The title—In Love with Tomorrow—evokes an emotional projection toward the future, a leap of trust and imagination. In sharp contrast with the fragility of its materials, the work invites reflection on the transience of things and the urgency of experiencing the present before it vanishes.
Within the exhibition Transparent Architectures, the work takes on additional meaning: it is not only a sculpture, but a perceptual environment, a mental space, a suspended architecture. It opens a passage into an emotional and contemplative dimension where transparency is not only a material quality, but also a symbolic one—an invitation to see beyond, to imagine what is not yet there.
Christina Kubisch, La serra, 2017-2025
La serra (“The Greenhouse”) by Christina Kubisch is a sound installation that interweaves music, visual art, and spatial perception, continuing the artist’s decades-long exploration of the relationships between sound, technology and the environment. The work is poetically inspired by the structure of greenhouses—spaces where nature is cultivated and managed collaboratively—but subverts their usual contents, replacing plants and flowers with invisible sound flows travelling through suspended wires, yellow and green like vegetal stems.
Within this forest, visitors are invited to move through the space wearing magnetic induction headphones, the only means through which the sounds can be heard. The audio tracks transmitted through the cables combine recordings of natural sounds (birdsongs, wind, rain) with noises generated by artificial devices such as computers, routers, and lights. The result is a hybrid, layered soundscape that shifts based on the visitor’s position and movement—making the body an active part of the system.
La serra is a space for individual listening, but also for collective experience. Moreover the work evokes the subtle boundary between the natural and the technological. In dialogue with other installations in the exhibition that emphasise the physical experience of space, Kubisch offers a form of sonic habitat in which nature is already filtered through culture, and where art becomes a tool for perceptual awareness.
Anna Pontel, Corpo inclinato, 2025
Through her work, Anna Pontel explores the relationship between space, perception, and identity. Corpo inclinato (Inclined Body) is a life-sized reproduction—rendered with an essential metal structure— of the layout of the apartment where the artist spent the lockdown period during the Covid-19 pandemic. Resting on a piece of furniture, the structure appears unstable and provisional, evoking the sense of suspension that defined those months.
Pontel constructs a walkable three-dimensional drawing, inviting viewers to physically immerse themselves in the volumes and layout of the domestic environment. The body thus becomes the measure and point of comparison for a space that is both personal and symbolic. The theme of the home—not just as a physical place, but as a container of experiences and habits—is central to her reflection, in keeping with the artist’s enduring interest in the forms of everyday life and their capacity for transformation.
In dialogue with the room in which it is installed, Corpo inclinato contrasts its empty, transparent outline with the painted architectural trompe-l’oeil on the surrounding walls: on one side, lived reality reduced to its essentials; on the other, pictorial illusion, fixed and deceptive. This interplay of contrasts—a recurring hallmark of Pontel’s work—challenges what is seen and what remains, navigating the tensions between memory, space, and presence.
Jeppe Hein, Double Ellipse, 2025
The works by Jeppe Hein exhibited at Villa Manin, Geometric Mirror X and Double Ellipse, are grounded in a shared poetics: the interaction between artwork, viewer, and context. Moving between conceptual art and minimalism, Hein employs geometric forms and reflective materials to provoke an active, conscious engagement from the public. His installations are never mere objects of contemplation, but perceptual and relational devices that invite play, wonder, and reflection.
Double Ellipse consists of two sets of mirror-polished metal steles of varying heights, arranged to form intersecting arcs. The work creates a walkable structure with two opposing entrances: a kind of transparent labyrinth that blurs image and reflection, reality and illusion. Visitors move through it as if in a fluid space—their images fragment, merge with the landscape and with other bodies, as real and mirrored glimpses alternate in a visual flow that recalls cinema.
As in Geometric Mirror X which refracts and multiplies perspectives within the villa, Double Ellipse also transforms space into an unstable, shared field of experience. The disorientation Hein creates is not physical, but mental. In a world where the relationship between individual and space is often mediated by digital devices and systems of control, Hein’s works offer a direct, sensory encounter—where every step, every gaze, every interaction becomes part of the artwork itself.
Jesús Rafael Soto, Pénétrable BBL Bleu, 1999
Jesús Rafael Soto was one of the leading figures of 20th-century kinetic and optical art. After an early education in Latin America, he moved to Paris, where he developed an artistic practice centred on movement, perception and interaction with the viewer. His work straddles the border between painting and sculpture, merging them into installations that exist through continuous change, activated by light, bodily movement and by the act of seeing.
His visual language employs simple materials—nylon threads, metal rods, transparent surfaces—to create structures that seem to dissolve into space, challenging the idea of the artwork as a fixed, immutable object.
Pénétrable BBL Bleu, composed of hundreds of suspended thin blue PVC tubes, generates a transparent, penetrable volume that invites the viewer to walk through it. The experience is not only visual: moving through this artificial forest activates tactile, auditory, and kinesthetic perception, establishing a direct relationship between body, space, and material.
Installed in the historic park of Villa Manin, the work enters into dialogue with the natural environment. The thin tubes sway gently in the wind, evoking the behavior of reeds or branches, while at the same time contrasting with organic elements through their artificial color and essential geometry. In this way, Soto’s intervention both echoes and contradicts the landscape that hosts it.
Dan Graham, Two-way Mirror Pavilion, 1998
Dan Graham is one of the most influential figures in American art of the late twentieth century, known for a cross-disciplinary approach that fused visual art, architecture, and critical theory. Central to his work is a reflection on space as a perceptual and relational construct. Themes such as reflection, the double, transparency, the boundary between public and private and the interaction between viewer and artwork run throughout his practice.
Two-way Mirror Pavilion, installed for the first time on the occasion of this exhibition, belongs to the series of Pavilions—walkable structures Graham began developing in the 1980s. Inspired by minimalism, urban architecture, and public park pavilions, these works are designed as spaces for experience and observation. The sculpture consists of two concentric triangular prisms made of metal and wood. Some of its sides consist of semi-reflective mirrors and others by regular grid panels, creating a constant interplay of opacity, reflection, and transparency.
The use of two-way mirror—which allows what lies behind the surface to coexist with the reflection of what stands before it—generates an ambiguous, fluid perceptual condition. Graham also draws from the Japanese tradition of shōji—sliding paper and wood panels that filter light and create flexible spatial boundaries. As with shōji, in the Pavilions the separation between interior and exterior is not determined, but dependent on gaze and movement.
The work introduces a critical reflection on perception, identity, while the act of looking becomes a tool for awareness: as we observe, we are observed; as we search for a fixed point, our point of view multiplies.