Francesco De Prezzo “Liminal Figures” at FORM, Wageningen – Amsterdam

In the small antechamber at the entrance, just before reaching the main exhibition space, seven vertically aligned canvases are displayed, each seemingly modest in size (around 50 x 40 cm or slightly larger). The first impression is deliberately disorienting; it’s unclear whether we’re stepping into a project room or stumbling upon works that aren’t part of any official display.
The latter seems more likely.

It’s within this subtle tension between what appears and what seems to fade that Francesco De Prezzo’s practice unfolds. I’ve followed his work for some time, drawn to his ability to question the act of documentation—whether through painting, photography, or sculpture. His works appear to hover between presence and withdrawal, as if caught in a constant negotiation between the materiality of the object and the way our gaze reconstructs (or reinvents) its distant presence.

In “Liminal Figures”, his latest exhibition, the works seem removed from the context of the show, disconnected, as if never placed or already taken down: a kind of calibrated void, one might say.
For De Prezzo, to document a work is to rewrite it. Separating the image from its context becomes a way of making visible, almost like twilight visions, a “normatively invisible” dimension of the exhibition space.

In practice, this might mean placing paintings elsewhere and leaving behind only clues: empty easels, orphaned labels, traces of previous installations on off-white walls. At other times, it involves overwriting or erasing his own pieces (often with white paint), returning them to a pre-narrative state, like a curtain drawn only halfway.

Just as at dusk we might imagine someone crossing the courtyard, De Prezzo’s work plays with a perpetual “before” and “after” that never quite arrive. Within this suspension lies a critique of exhibition conventions: art is no longer anchored in a fixed space with a clearly defined display. Instead, a distinct (or perhaps subtly crafted) divide emerges between the images of the works and the space in which they might belong, suggesting the exhibition exists in a state of assembly, or in a moment of hesitation before completion.

It’s hard not to recall Rosalind Krauss’s notion of the “expanded field” or the work of Michael Asher, figures who opened up the terrain of institutional critique by engaging directly with space. De Prezzo pushes this conversation further, into the very mechanism of perception itself.

Does the eye build reality from fragments of memory and desire?
In an era where the installation view reigns as the dominant form of artistic truth, even the “reality” of an artwork becomes fluid, negotiable, and ultimately elusive.

The choice to present the paintings in a separate documentation underlines this strange tension.

Now I’m alone, flashlight off, staring into a random point in the dark, searching for a meaning that refuses to be caught. And in that total absence, I realize: perhaps it was only my own expectations that kept me safe all along.
—A. K. Wern

at FORM, Wageningen – Amsterdam
until May 26, 2025