“To see an object, to see the light (Vedere un oggetto, vedere la luce)” is an exhibition featuring work by a cross-generational group of Italian artists and thinkers, including fourteen current practitioners and several from the past—among them figures like Galileo Galilei, Alessandro Volta, Carol Rama, and Alighiero e Boetti—whose legacies both inform and enrich the contemporary works on display. The exhibition will be on view from May 29 through June 26 at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Guarene d’Alba; an opening reception will be held on Sunday, May 29 from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.

Taking into account its site at a stately palazzo among rolling hills and vineyards, the exhibition will suggest the mind of a fictionalized and somewhat eccentric collector at work. This invisible figure—composed, inevitably, from the amalgamated tastes and concerns of the exhibition’s three curators—has amassed and arranged a selection of contemporary and historical artworks alongside objects from the scientific and natural world in a space that is at once a palace, a museum, and a laboratory.

An important touchstone informing both the curatorial methodology and conceptual content of this exhibition is Joris-Karl Huysmans’s seminal 1884 novel À rebours. This literary work introduces the character of Jean Des Esseintes, an aristocratic aesthete who withdraws to a rural palace, intent on creating his own insular sanctuary of beauty and reflection. In Esseintes’s hermetically sealed interior, the symbolic power of objects and their perception become a foundation for new forms of belief. Yet while Huysmans’s novel elevates artifice to a kind of apotheosis, the objects and artworks on view at Palazzo Re Rebaudengo are more firmly rooted in reality. In this way, To see an object, to see the light seeks to demonstrate that empiricism and wonder are not in opposition, but intimately intertwined.

At the exhibition’s core is an exploration of the interdependent notions of light and substance. Light, though immaterial, allows for the perception of the material world; the interplay of light against solid objects—the moon, for instance, or a mirror—is essential to vision. Works that take light as their source material or subject matter will therefore be displayed alongside others that emphatically assert their objecthood. In this way, both the totemic quality of materials and the physics of pure perception are evoked in an immersive installation that revels in sensuousness while still questioning the scientific causes at its root. This approach suggests a doubled understanding of vision as the source of both comprehension and imagination.

Artists: Salvatore Arancio, Francesco Barocco, Marco Basta, Alighiero e Boetti, Chiara Camoni, Mario Ciaramitaro, Piero Fogliati, Luca Francesconi, Linda Fregni Nagler, Francesco Gennari, Giovanni Giaretta, Isola e Norzi, Diego Marcon, Alek O., Agne Raceviciute, Carol Rama, Alessandro Sciaraffa.