Frangible

Chiara Bertola

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After spending a long period in Turin, I finally returned to Elisabetta Di Maggio’s studio in Venice’s Cannaregio district. This is the same quarter where Tintoretto lived, and it is one of the few places that has successfully retained the feel of Venice that welcomed me in 1982, when I came to study at university.

Today, I am here to spend some time with her, to reexamine her works, to get (cautiously) hands-on with the exceptionally fragile materials they are made from, and to rediscover words and thoughts that belong to us. They are the fruit of a long friendship, based on listening, trust and sharing back and forth. Risks, doubts, insights, enthusiasms, and revelations have, over time, built up the sort of intimacy that can be generated between an artist and a curator. It is in this mental space — a kind of ‘conceptual home’ which has been with us for years — where we continue to find ourselves.

So I picked back up the thread of a dialogue that has really never been on hiatus, ever since the moment I met her for the first time, back when she was one of Venice’s up-and-coming artists in the 1980s. I still remember very well one of her first works: a Corredo (Bridal outfit) for a single woman, made from wrapping tissue and sugar flowers. Despite its apparent simplicity, this constituted a radical choice, since it saw her address female solitude using ephemeral materials, as if to say, ‘I’ll make my work entirely on my own.’ Even back then, those fragile gestures exuded a silent power and a heartfelt tenacity. It was in that tension between vulnerability and resistance that I recognised straight away the hallmark of her practice: a ‘resistant fragility’ — a living oxymoron that continues to define her way of being and of creating.

With time, this tension has been clarified and transformed, ending up embodied in one of the themes that I feel is becoming increasingly central to her work: vertigo. It is a dimension that permeates all of her output and, deeper still, also her way of life. While we work together on the preparations for the exhibition at GAM, which I am curating with Fabio Cafagna, I discover it everywhere in her work. ‘For me, vertigo is an existential condition. It is not what happens after the fall, but before,’ Elisabetta tells me.

It is about hanging in the balance, holding one’s breath; the moment at which everything could fall apart. The materials she selects are fragile, perishable, and often exposed to damage or destruction. They are geared towards precariousness. ‘It is as if they are leading me naturally to say what I want to say’, she states. She pushes them to the limit, putting them ‘under stress’ until they seem about to give way. However, the sense of vertigo and possible fracture is everywhere. It can be felt in the walls of wrapping tissue, in the thorns rammed into corners, in the pins that chart the trajectory of a butterfly, in the incredibly thin porcelain, and in the carved veins of her leaves. They are visual signals of a silent alert, which traverses her whole oeuvre and, today, even the exhibi- tion space. They force us to stop, look, and listen. 1 All of Elisabetta’s words quoted here come from a conversation we had in her studio in Venice 3 Y. Haenel, Solitudine Caravaggio on 7 August 2025. Neri Pozza Editore, Vicenza 2025, pp. 58-60. chiara bertola – frangible 16 chiara bertola – frangible 17

It was in 1999 that she initially experimented with the inconsistency of material, through the slowly melting ice pots of the work Pianto. We exhibited them for the first time in Venice, at Ludovica Barbieri’s gallery, and then in the Vulnerable Lands exhibition at Hangar Bicocca in Milan in 2010 with the title Dissonances (fig. 1, p. 7). Back then, there were seven of them. Today, there are still four of them on display: hung on the walls, dripping, while they melt within those same casts that formed them. The material returns to water and is transformed into sound. The Italian title Pianto (Cry) contained in itself a dual meaning: on the one hand, the reference to planting, generating; on the other, the connotation of loss and pain — two meanings only apparently opposite, which were fused in a vital tension. With this work, Elisabetta consolidated a direction that would then become crucial for her: the experience of change not as disintegration, but as a form of resist- ance. The drips of the melting pots were turned into sound: time rendered perceptible, measurement of life. In this way, the work also becomes a reflection on time: time that constructs and destroys, transforms and dissolves, making visible the passage between what is and what is not. From this emerged the constant practice of doing, undoing, and redoing. It is a process that rejects the definitive form to embrace instead a provi- sional, unstable, mutable form; a form that respects the very fragility of living. The melting ice pots, the outfits of paper or sugar that break apart, a wall dry- cleaned with soap... these were the first gestures that I had seen in her work; acts full of determination, seemingly useless yet necessary. New, radical, perfectly in line with the — professional and existential — instability that we were living through. They were acts that announced even then a sense of urgency, an ethics of slow time and of presence. I recall an interview in Flash Art from many years ago, in which she stated: ‘You are only what you are doing, and the work stands as a testament to all this.

And I wrote: ‘To try to capture endless time in her meshes of the finite, Elisabetta has chosen the path of precision, finiteness and rigour. Properties that serve to ward off their oppo- site: the fear of disorder, the anguish of the infinite, the danger of misinterpretation.’ For me, a Turin native, and for Milan-born Elisabetta, who both came to Venice as youngsters, being schooled there had a profound and decisive significance in our work. Venice teaches you to attribute value to things: every gesture, every step has a weight, a measure, a rhythm. Here you learn that you cannot go faster than your legs will let you, nor can you carry more than your body can bear. You live in a space that educates you about limits, about the necessity of not being wasteful, and the need to recognise the equilibrium between your physical potential and the context that surrounds you. Time and space are experienced physically: walking, transporting and crossing all become experiences of awareness. The city functions is like a ‘school of attention’: it teaches you how to observe, measure, and contain. It compels you to find a balance, which ultimately shapes your way of life, even in different environments. A key stage in Elisabetta’s career was her project for the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice, which marked the start of her work with mosaics made from stamps. On that occasion, she had presented a floor composed entirely of those little postal fragments, installed on the top storey of the building — once a hotel for Saxon merchants, before becoming the headquarters of the Venetian postal service (fig. 2, p. 8). In those mosaics, it was possible to discern a deeply embedded connection to the Venetian decorative tradition, since they were reminiscent of the floors of Saint Mark’s and the Ca’ d’Oro — an archaeology of the past and the design of a rediscovered order. Reflected in those fragments were the artisanal history of the city, its stratified beauty and a far-reaching relationship with time and space. Viewing those mosaics — and, more generally, many of her other works — the spell is cast immediately: the accuracy and delicateness of her output capture our gaze, hypno- tising us. However, together with the beauty, what is also triggered is a subtle dizzi- ness, that sensation which comes when we find ourselves facing something too perfect, too fragile, too ephemeral to be truly grasped. Her world seems to oscillate between order and chaos, between absolute control and the possibility of the unexpected, which can break, cancel or transform everything in an instant. Elisabetta’s work thus comes across as the map of a new nature, recomposed and harmonised inside the weave of a calmer time; an idealised design that tries to mend what the passing of time and human brutality have lacerated. Another theme which I consider to be fundamental to her work — and one often at the centre of our conversations — is the question of time. Time as luxury, as delib- erate choice. The time that is taken to create is not just an instrument, but a constit- uent part of the work. It is the principal material of her oeuvre and is closely bound up with another central element: the fact of being made by hand. For this artist, the relationship with the materials she uses has always been a driving force. This necessity that pushes her to explore and transform them with an empirical and experimental approach (fig. 3, p. 9). Every material has, for her, its own vocation; a behavioural apti- tude that becomes an integral part of her inspiration. She does not limit herself to using them; she studies them, observes them, and frequents them over the long term until she understands their reactions and possibilities for transformation. She does not follow codified techniques; instead, she invents a personal method on a case-by-case basis, constructed on a foundation of time, effort, and concentration. It is a method that belongs to her alone. I came to understand that for her, the hand-made element is political, human; it is as if to declare ‘let’s remain human’, because ‘the size of the hand is what matters.’ Yet, often, the public does not realise it, failing to differentiate between what is cut by hand and what is produced using a machine. People remain incredulous vis-à-vis the time taken to cut, carve, glue, and compose. There is almost a lack of tolerance regarding this slowness, a difficulty in accepting the dedication that the work requires. Time and again, she has perceived this hand-made aspect being viewed as an annoy- ance, because it connotes a slow-motion gaze, a comparison with the past, a time frame for observation that today we are no longer prepared to set aside. The implicit question is: ‘Why did you waste all that time, when you could have just made it with a mould?’ 18 chiara bertola – frangible 19 Perhaps it is for this reason that a work like Annunciation, two giant dragonfly wings — laser-cut from metal — achieved more immediate success. They are more accessible, more reassuring. They seduce. They can be worn and photographed, trans- forming those who put them on. They are lightweight, they caress you, and they do not shatter. They enable a relationship that is also physical, almost erotic, which many of her other — more intimate, more silent — works seem, in contrast, to deny. Her wings make it possible to play, to become an angel or a dragonfly, to be another, with no sense of vertigo. While it is not there that the true intensity of her work is concen- trated, being exhibited at the start of the exhibition, the wings of Annunciation indeed appear on the wall like two large dragonfly wings. Still, they also evoke the angel wings of Renaissance annunciations. Silver-plated, they seem to vibrate in the whiteness, projecting the interweaving shadows that render them intangible. Elisabetta chose the shape of the dragonfly for its membranous structure, similar to a Gothic window or the vein skeleton of a leaf. In this work, play and grace live together, as do lightness and a private spiritual tension: a mute invitation to transform ourselves. All of Elisabetta’s work embodies the concept of impermanence, regardless of the forms or materials used. It is the dimension of indeterminacy and instability, a condi- tion that we could define as ατοποσ — a precarious, delocalised, suspended place. This is clearly perceptible in her most recent works, the Cosmographiæ: delicate wax mosaics spread across very fine gauzes, stretched on rounded wooden frames, similar to those used for embroidery. The fragments of wax, set like tesserae, compose forms that are reminiscent of maps, worlds adrift, temporary constellations. Exhibited in scale sequence, from the largest to the smallest, these works draw their inspiration from ancient geographical representations, when knowledge of the world was still partial and, for that reason, open to the imagination. ‘My mosaics are fragments that recall something, which seem to be something despite being abstract,’ she wrote to me. ‘As if they were continents drifting or worlds being formed.’ Neither specific places, nor non-places, but delocalised spaces, on the edge between recognition and confusion, between form and metamorphosis. What Elisabetta works to represent is a ‘lost’ time: a time of waiting, of suspension, as summoned up by the Venetian saying fiar caigo — ‘spinning the fog’ — which con- notes getting lost, losing one’s way, but also pursuing what is not yet properly defined. We find this same tension in the drawing made on Plastazote (the material used by entomologists to study insects) that charts the flight trajectory of a butterfly. A fragile, unstable, apparently random line. But as Elisabetta clarifies: ‘Butterflies know where they want to go, but they cannot fly in a straight line. They are forced to take complex routes in order to reach their destination. This is a good metaphor for our paths through life.’ Her works trace this type of line: not straight, but necessary. Like the large glass tapestry germinating on the wall of a room: a mosaic composed of shards of glass that shine like a watercolour made of light. The pixel-like tiles outline a ramification that recalls the same time a root system, a synapse, a tree and a net — a living map, in constant evolution. Recently, Elisabetta has increasingly turned her attention to glass, visiting the kilns of Murano and exploring the deposits of forgotten materials, the residues of an ancient craft that fascinates her. She takes the hardness of glass, its obstinate resistance, and smashes it into endless little squares, fragments of light that become mosaics, capturing its sparkle and transparency. Once again, her tireless, silent performance is channelled into a work that is nurtured and then takes place in slow motion. A patient and necessary time, marked by the precise and meticulous gestures of the hand as it cuts and breaks fragments of glass, salvaged from remnants of other works. Scraps, as she calls them, which through her cutting and transformation, are brought back to life, becoming testaments to existence and resistance. There’s always something visionary and stubborn in her process: cutting by hand, piece by piece, allowing the work to grow slowly, like a plant in nature, gradually revealing itself to the gaze. A million miles from gigantism and spectacu- larity, this artist works within the limits of her hand, pushing herself to the edge of physical resistance and of the material itself. Having engaged with her oeuvre for years now — and also having had discussions with her and having read her writings — I know that her work takes shape within a network of connections: organic weaves, bodily circuits, city maps, cellular struc- tures; distant elements, brought together by a reticular logic that speaks of a hidden, deep-rooted order passing through that which is alive. Her works make these struc- tures visible, measuring them and transcribing them into forms that are at once design, vision and system. Scientific and anthropological sources are intertwined with more intimate materials, such as embroidery, tapestry and ornamental motifs, betraying a constant dialogue between micro- and macrocosmos. This leads to a meditation on existence as part of an organic, ever-changing whole: nature regenerates, expands, and multiplies based on laws that are often fractal, difficult to break down, but genera- tive of life (figs. 4, 5, p. 11). Perhaps the heart of her poetics lies right here: in a space where the viewer is called upon to truly see, to grasp what is concealed beneath the surface. Her fragile maps, thorns and cuts that traverse the material speak of the precariousness of living, but also of the beauty hidden in the ‘multitudes’ — the forms, languages and connections that inhabit the world and living beings. And, equally, they refer to a larger design, that of the universe, to which we all belong. At a time when the sense of belonging is deteriorating and everything seems to be falling to pieces, her art returns to speak to us with a necessary clarity, with an urgency that we cannot ignore. I have invested a great deal of time in the hope of gleaning an understanding of the profound significance of the concept of beauty in her work. It is a theme that has always constituted a dangerous pitfall, contorting the critical reading of her practice, reducing and downgrading that interpretation to the purely aesthetic dimension. However, in her works, beauty plays its part in what is a profound ambiguity. It is a beauty that embraces, but can deceive; one that attracts, but then fades. It is a beauty that is manifested only apparently, because under the precise, chiselled, delicate surface, 20 21 there always lies something else: a silent violence, a death postponed, a form of perisha- bility. Beauty, then, is not an end, but a veil, a threshold. ‘My works are certainly beauti- ful,’ she has told me many times, ‘but that’s because they must describe death to you.’ It is precisely here that the danger is nestled. Beauty, which everyone notices first off, can become the enemy: it distracts, reassures, and makes it hard to see. However, her work does not stop at the surface; it goes beyond it, calling it into question. She uses beauty to carry the gaze elsewhere. Like a cut, a thorn: something that seems fragile, harmonious, and elegant — yet it harms, lacerates, and constrains us to look. Thorns, of course, at once protect and wound. They defend, but they do so through an aggressive gesture, which repels. They are a form of alert, of warning, and they carry inscribed in their body a duality that greatly interests me: the con- cealed threat inherent in things, the possibility that the thing which protects can itself become a danger. A refined form of violence. A perfect geometry that can pierce. They attract and repel us, seducing us while cautioning us, as if they had inscribed within themselves the dual sign of caring and injuring. As you make your way through the exhibition, you come across various alarm signals. One of the most emblematic is the presence of the bronze thorns, made to grow in the garden — a possible Eden, perhaps, but one laden with snares. Thorns had already appeared years ago in her Venetian home, on the edges of a pillar, but only now has the artist felt the need to revisit them, transforming them into a work and bringing them into the public space of the exhibition. In the show, they ‘arm’ a central column, rendering it dangerous. If you walk without paying attention, you get hurt. They are a memento, a mute warning. They speak of our everyday condition, our need to make our way through life with an awareness of hazard, an acknowledgement that beauty, when it is real, can also hurt you. This ambivalent sense of threat — subtle, but constant — is found throughout her oeuvre: an unstable equilibrium, in which the welcoming and reassuring form fasci- nates but does not console; in truth, it always puts us on alert. It is a tension that I have also always discerned in the act of cutting, which has become so crucial to her practice. ‘Drawing’ with a scalpel is not like doing so with a pencil; the scalpel brooks no correc- tions. Every line is a decision, a scar, an irreversible opening up to another dimension. It is a precise, surgical act, with nothing decorative about it. And yet, often, her cuts in wrapping tissue are mistaken for embroidery. Once again, the gaze comes to rest on the surface and translates what is a wound into an ornament; what is an aperture into decoration; what is critical into the ‘feminine’. However, Elisabetta has never embroidered; in fact, she has only ever done some sewing. Even her sewing was never an ornamental gesture; instead, it was a reparatory, surgical, almost corporeal act — closer to leather than to tapestry. On many occasions, her work has been confined to reassuring, reductive read- ings, and the complexity of her artistic idiom has repeatedly been slotted into the cat- egories of the ‘aesthetic’, the ‘delicate’, and the ‘feminine’. Yet, those cuts are displays, wounds, openings. They concern loss, absence and transformation. It is no accident that the exhibition in Turin is titled Frangible. This word does not mean ‘fragile’; rather, it denotes something ‘that can be broken’. It is a limit point, a tension, an unstable equilibrium. Today, more than ever before, everything appears frangible: not just materials, but also social structures, relationships, and democracies. The world itself is frangible. In 2017, I had invited Elisabetta and Giovanni Anselmo to exhibit at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia: the latter in the Scarpa-designed spaces, the former in the old museum. I was interested in bringing together artists whose work was divergent but linked by a shared engagement with the idea of the infinite. I knew the high esteem in which Elisabetta held Giovanni, and that exhibition revealed a deep-seated affiliation, which, albeit not openly declared, was still evident. Two discrete artistic languages that, through dialogue, succeeded in touching upon the same existential questions: time, space, and the invisible, which holds everything aloft. In 2025, Elisabetta gave the title Point of Infinity to one of her exhibitions. In geometry, the ‘point’ refers to the direction in which parallel lines converge: a visible yet unreachable place. For her, it is a symbol of creative tension, a mental space where imagination and desire take form. This concept has become a guiding principle: advancing along a line that does not lead to a destination, but rather opens up possibilities. Looking back now at Elisabetta’s work, on the occasion of the exhibition at GAM, and making my way through each piece on display — the cuts, the spines and thorns, the intangibility, the invisibility and the light-heartedness that mark them out — I am reminded of that ‘point of solitude’ to which Jean-Christophe Bailly refers when he talks about animals:2 elusive creatures that avoid the eye, hide, flee — just as nature does — until they reach an inaccessible place, where no one can follow them, a space that is enclosed, where they are protected. I believe that this applies to all great art, and in particular to a number of con- temporary artists. They are the ones whom I think of as woodland creatures: beings that find refuge in dark, secluded spaces, where light enters only to illuminate an event — that which takes place in the work, and there alone. This thought also accompanied me while reading Yannick Haenel’s Caravaggio Solitude, 3 where he writes about Merisi’s painting. According to Haenel, the act of painting is never innocent: it is a radical, violent act, which breaks the equilibrium, which wounds the material in order to imbue it with form. It is, then, ‘a criminal act’ — albeit beautiful and irremediable — that transforms the world as it carves it. It is just by starting from this insight that I have now been able to re-read Elisabetta’s work. Her practice, too, is marked by a subtle but implacable tension, composed of cuts, lacerations, and wounds inflicted with care and lucidity. Every act is painstaking, considered, committed, yet also an act of separation, an irreversible choice, an incision. In that incision, in that silent crime of form, it bears witness to itself.

Following her work for many years has meant, for me, precisely this: trying to intercept that point of solitude of hers. Endeavouring to get close, without violating that space into which the artist withdraws, concentrates herself, transforms 2 J.-C. Bailly, Il versante animale (Rome: Contrasto, 2021). 3 Y. Haenel, Solitudine Caravaggio (Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 2025), pp. 58-60. chiara bertola – frangible 22 herself. I believe that the actual subject of her work is to be found there. It is there that the gesture is born: the cut, the sign, the pressure exercised on the material, the abso- lute precision of the hand on the sheet, on the living body of the material. Vertigo. It is precisely in that meticulous and silent, ascetic act that we can, I believe, also capture its spirituality. Perhaps the artist’s point of solitude is exactly this: not a refuge, but the place necessary for her to take on the responsibility of her actions. It is a place where we are irreducibly alone, as we face the material, the passage of time, and the risks involved. Mondovì, August 2025