The exhibition Portrait: Memory, Identity, Transformation by Giorgio Tentolini and Michel Cogo, hosted at Kromya Art Gallery in Verona, explores portraiture not as a mere static representation, but as a constantly evolving construct. Part of the celebrations for March 8th and the “power of women” initiative organized by the Municipality of Verona, the exhibition challenges the traditional view of portraiture as fixed and unchanging. Art is seen here as a space for metamorphosis—a realm of sedimentation, intersection, and reemergence.

In this exhibition, the two artists delve into portraiture as a process that not only reveals but also conceals, questioning memory, identity, and the traces left by time. The image of a figure is no longer a fixed representation but a field of experiences where memory and oblivion intertwine and merge, creating a dynamic balance between what persists and what fades away. Tentolini and Cogo

invite the viewer to reflect on how the human figure, as well as the face and body, can be interpreted as surfaces of signs, traces, and transformations.
Giorgio Tentolini, through the use of material overlays, creates works that deconstruct the human figure, presenting the face in unstable and evanescent forms. His portraits never crystallize into an absolute idea of beauty, instead manifesting as remnants of a past that is continually reactivated. His work explores how memory, while being an accumulation of experiences, becomes a visual
constraint, where the stratification of images is not only an act of preservation but also a form of imprisonment, trapping the image within time.
Tentolini is known for his ability to bring out a meditative lightness, using materials such as tulle and metal mesh to give transparency and suspension to the image.

Michel Cogo, on the other hand, works within the domain of graphic marks, an immediate and definitive language that resists the fleeting nature of the digital age. Every line Cogo inscribes on paper is definitive, without the possibility of revision. His approach is inherently rooted in a slow and irreversible time, one that does not fit into the rapid pace of the contemporary world. In his portraits, the mark becomes a physical act that resists the ephemeral, a trace that builds and dissolves, much like identity, always in metamorphosis. His work evokes the concept of rhizome, as articulated by Deleuze and Guattari, where drawing is open and ever-evolving, without fixed hierarchies. Memory, therefore, emerges as an unconscious writing, an intertwining of traces that narrates the transformation and metamorphosis of the individual.

The exhibition develops around a dual mythological and philosophical reference: on one side, the image connects to the myth of Mnemosyne, the Titaness of memory, and on the other, to the river Lete, symbolizing oblivion. Memory and oblivion are not opposing forces but elements that interpenetrate and constantly redefine the subject. This theme is closely tied to Gilles Deleuze’s vision of identity as an ongoing process of transformation. The exhibition invites the audience to reflect on the instability of the image and the perpetual transformation of perception.

In this context, the artwork becomes a journey through the metamorphosis of perception, a crossing of the threshold of the image, where every face is a testimony and fragment, every trace is a gateway, and every mark is an act of transfiguration. Art, thus, is not just representation, but a lived experience—an encounter between visual metaphor and observer—where identity never fixes itself but continually redefines itself in the very act of being observed. As philosopher Mikel Dufrenne asserts, art is not merely perception but a lived experience that enriches itself in the very act of looking.

Photo credits: Michele Sereni