I have a crazy,
crazy love of things.
I like pliers,
and scissors.
I love
cups,
rings,
and bowls —
not to speak, of course,
of hats.
I love
all things,
not just
the grandest, also
the
infinitely
small —
thimbles,
spurs,
plates,
and flower vases.
[. . .]
O irrevocable
river
of things:
no one can say
that I loved only
fish,
or the plants of the jungle and the field,
that I loved
only
those things that leap and climb, desire, and survive.
It’s not true:
many things conspired
to tell me the whole story.
Not only did they touch me,
or my hand touched them:
they were
so close
that they were a part
of my being,
they were so alive with me
that they lived half my life
and will die half my death.
—Pablo Neruda, Ode to Things
The exhibition—which takes its title from Pablo Neruda’s poem of the same name—highlights the importance of the objects that surround us and the revolutionary possibility of imagining and re-imagining them in space, in relation to our bodies and our feelings.
The project, curated by Sarah Cosulich, reunites a selection of twenty-five works of art and design (among them the Editions, realised in ceramics by Mutina) from the collection of Massimo Orsini. Through paintings, photographs and sculptures by eighteen artists and designers, the exhibition establishes a dialogue among different types of still lifes, suggested, built, inspired or derived: vases, bottles and glasses reflect, echo and multiply in the space, as in a fluid and seeming mirroring game. The life of things—an essential source of inspiration for Mutina’s ceramic work and a significant subject of the collection—becomes an impulse for an exchange without hierarchies which takes the shape of a large, all-encompassing composition. As in Neruda’s poem, the “inanimate” comes alive, and objects become figures on stage which, in their bi-dimensionality and tridimensionality, suggest stratified spaces and narrations.
Ode to Things celebrates the importance of the everyday, highlighting the diverse approaches through which common objects are interpreted. Language, form, existential metaphor, functionality, ironic reference, phenomenological study, intimate and subjective representation, a pretext to test the limits of painting: in the exhibition, images and things uncover a complex landscape of human desires, fears and beauty of the ordinary. The objects reveal themselves in the elegance of form and in the semantic complexities of their constructions, in a constant short circuit between modernism, illusionism, vanitas and seduction.
Presented on the occasion of Mutina’s twentieth anniversary, Ode to Things is also a celebration of the three souls of the company. The exhibition project is set up, in fact, as a dialogue among art, design and ceramics, giving way to a visual and conceptual narration which reflects the identity and vision of the brand. The works in the show thus become a homage to the creative path of Mutina, that, in the past twenty years, has collaborated with the most significant contemporary designers to celebrate the essence of ceramics.
Artists and Designers in the Exhibition:
Ronan Bouroullec, John Currin, Filippo de Pisis, Peter Dreher, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Luigi Ghirri,
Damien Hirst, Georges Jouve, Ingeborg Lundin, Aimée Moreau, Fischli/Weiss, Ed Ruscha, Ettore Sottsass, Rudolf Stingel, Wolfgang Tillmans, Goran Trbuljak, and Franco Vimercati.
at Spazio Mutina Fiorano, Modena
until August 8, 2025