2025. Varese. 4, Via Cavallotti. Public installation.
In June, in the heart of Varese’s pedestrian centre, at 4 Via Cavallotti, a new public art initiative brings contemporary art into the urban space. The project is promoted by Showcases Gallery in collaboration with artist Carlo Buzzi.
The short circuit of meaning
In a lively corner of central Varese, six display cases transform the urban landscape into a visual enigma, a poetic provocation that challenges perception and shared visual culture. Carlo Buzzi’s installation takes the form of an open-air gallery, where art, irony and philosophy mingle in a play of free associations, unexpected echoes and semantic short circuits.
Each display case makes a paradoxical statement: Mondrian is reincarnated as a chicken; Van Gogh takes the form of a grater; Picasso becomes a toilet brush. These combinations offer neither mockery nor blasphemy, but an act of reversal: high and low, icon and everyday object, genius and banality merge into a reflection on the consumption of images and the mythology of art.
These ‘visual equations’ are not to be deciphered with a single key, but explored with a curious and critical eye. They carry a Dadaist legacy, a Pop aftertaste and a conceptual vein that unsettles museum reverence: here, art leaves its frame and slips into lived experience.
The QR code in one of the display cases takes viewers into another dimension, seemingly distant yet consistent with the work: the Wikipedia page for Gorgias of Leontini, the Greek sophist for whom nothing exists; even if something existed, it could not be known; and even if it could be known, it could not be communicated. This is the installation’s philosophical heart: an invitation to question the stability of meaning and to reflect on the impossibility of absolute truth in images and words.
At the end of the sequence, the artist himself appears dressed as a friar, in a pose explicitly recalling Padre Pio. It is an act of imitation and disguise, but also an ironic and critical self-portrait: Buzzi presents himself as a ‘secular saint’, officiating at a ritual of ambiguity, bearing witness to an art that does not claim to provide answers but raises questions.
The installation at Showcases Gallery is therefore more than an exhibition: it is an intervention in language, a sabotage of the predictable, an operation that stages a crisis of meaning as a liberating possibility. Art does not teach, console or reassure: if anything, it disorients, like an ancient philosopher, a wrong image or a fabricated relic. It is precisely in this disorientation that a space opens for a new way of seeing.
Showcases Gallery
Developed by Franco Crugnola Studio di Architettura, Showcases Gallery is conceived as a ‘distributed gallery’, embedded in the fabric of the city and visible to everyone at any hour of the day or night. The idea grew from a desire to create a dynamic, accessible space to explore new artistic research in the region, encouraging everyday cultural engagement through an immediate and engaging visual language.
