ILLUSIONI E DISILLUSIONI
ipotesi di spazi illogici

artistic project by
Pietro Travaglini and Antonella Cinelli
curated by Sandro Malossini and Alessandra Silvestri

As part of ART CITY Bologna 2025 on the occasion of ARTEFIERA, a few steps from Porta San Vitale, the designer Pietro Travaglini opens his atelier to host a project created in collaboration with the artist Antonella Cinelli, promoted by Felsina Factory with the Patronage of the Legislative Assembly of the Emilia-Romagna Region.

The meeting between the two creatives is an invitation to reflect on the perception of the self and the other within that intimate and symbolic space that is one's own living dimension.
An open door between the two approaches to creation hypothesized as a metaphor for the infinite possibility offered by the exchange and sharing of different points of observation.

7.02.2025 - 1.03.2025

Atelier Pietro Travaglini
Via Zanolini 7 Bologna

"There is a phrase on the home page of the architect designer Pietro Travaglini that I found particularly suitable to accompany this temporary exhibition: "Objects always in motion that stimulate the imagination". What is more beautiful and exciting than being able to involve a visitor, to make him participate and not just a spectator. The difficult thing is to succeed without entering into performative or environmental fields but only and exclusively through objects and paintings. Antonella Cinelli's work is a conceptual research that uses painting in an almost hyper-realistic form, with slight pop connotations, supported and characterized by a strong personality that has found its precise identity in portraying young female figures from behind, with hair in the foreground that often envelops the face and bodies that vanish in the transparency of veiled clothes, arabesques and decorated with precious tiles like rich Byzantine mosaics. What is behind those volumes of hair in motion, that perhaps hide our thoughts, that stimulate us to imagine faces and characters, and what are those shadows, almost pure memories, that outline chairs and furniture by a designer of memory, that appear on the large monochrome backgrounds that accompanied Antonella Cinelli's production for a long time. Her paintings force you to stop, you cannot see them and move on, you cannot say "how beautiful" without perceiving the presence of absence, of negation as a founding and supporting element of the work.

For Pietro Travaglini it is he himself who tells us that his objects are always in motion and stimulate the imagination. And it is true: when I was in his studio for the first time, which today hosts this exhibition, I had the sensation of being on a boat where suddenly the sea, the waves, moved the bookcases, the lights, the furniture everywhere. But everything was still, immobile: the clever use of light and the modules that structure his designer involve, envelop, disorient easy readings. The Schiena bookcase, a masterpiece of synthesis and transposition, or the Metropoli chair that could be defined as brilliant, have in themselves all the elements of the great designer, that impalpability of flavor that envelops every lasting creation. Pietro Travaglini has another gift that I would like to emphasize, and that is that of concealment that, as in Antonella Cinelli, does not want to reveal everything immediately, it leaves you time to look and then understand that what is in reality is not. Fictio-onis, remade, or invention of the mind, what is created with the imagination, is perhaps the thing that unites Antonella Cinelli and Pietro Travaglini most."

Sandro Malossini