Philippe Parreno
April 11 – July 4, 2026 | Spazio Per Arte, Palazzo Bellini, Oleggio
Poised between desire and dissolution, “FRAGILITY – The Dance of Life and Death” is born, a group exhibition that profoundly and prolifically explores the eternal dialogue between Eros and Thanatos, primary human drives, opposing and complementary symbols of life and death, libido and inhibition, harmony and discord, the organic and the inorganic, music and silence.
Through the works of numerous artists from different generations and disciplines and media—from photography to painting, video, sculpture, and installation—the exhibition deeply explores the fragile balance that, from that time, permeates our existence: that focal point where the creative force of Eros—understood as vital energy, desire, union, and generation, the driving force of art and science—is inextricably intertwined with the destructive instinct of Thanatos, a subterranean and ineluctable force, an expression of denial, deprivation, and transience. The exhibition unfolds throughout the entire SPA | Spazio Per Arte space like a disturbing dance, simultaneously visual and sensorial: a veritable alternation of tensions and harmonies, of forms that arise and then dissolve, of bodies that love and decay, of matter that stands as a symbol of our vulnerability. Each work thus becomes a testimony to the conflict and coexistence of opposites, in a time when human fragility emerges as a central theme, a mirror of an era marked by crisis, metamorphosis, and an increasingly frenetic search for meaning. "FRAGILITY – The Dance of Life and Death" does not intend to offer answers, but rather invites us to experience the interval between one heartbeat and the next, between the impulse that fuels the vital and the increasingly pressing propensity toward the most sinister of oblivions. A dizzyingly poetic and profoundly restless exploration of our condition, where art becomes body, thought, gesture, memory, and omen—beyond good and evil, driven by the spirit of music.