FAI presents “Nel tempo“, an exhibition that, through fifty-nine works by twenty-three artists from the Panza di Biumo Collection, explores one of the most mysterious and complex subjects in our lives: time.

“I don’t know what happened to time. Whether it exploded all at once, whether it slowly filled with ever-thinner cracks until it crumbled, whether it deformed, twisting, crumpling, tangling on itself.”

The Collapse of Time, Italo Calvino

From 6 June 2024 to 6 January 2025 at the Villa and Collezione Panza in Varese the exhibition Nel tempo*, curated by Gabriella Belli with Marta Spanevello, is on display. Among the authors: Hanne Darboven, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, Jan Dibbets, Walter De Maria, Franco Vimercati, Cioni Carpi, Maurizio Mochetti and Robert Tiemann. 

“In contemporary art, time is, appears, reveals itself. It is a phenomenon to be investigated, not as a symbol or divinity, but as an immaterial and intangible presence, the amniotic fluid of the cosmos in which we float, the cradle of our every mood, every action, every awakening, every image and representation of reality,” says Gabriella Belli – curator of the scientific project of the Villa and the Panza Collection since February 2024 – introducing the exhibition, which is divided into two narrative registers, eternal time and the time of reality, which guide the visitor through the five sections of the exhibition: sense (of time), duration (of time), places (of time), noise (of time) and experience (of time).  

A reflection, that on time and art, which is particularly present at Villa e Collezione Panza, as Marco Magnifico, FAI President, declares: “At the moment when a personal dialogue is opened with a work of art, time loses its physical variable to assume a spiritual one, therefore timeless. In all the works exhibited in this review, reflection on the ‘physicality’ of time – and thus also on its ‘non-physicality’ – is the very subject of artistic inspiration. Time, like everything in life, is but can also not be: everything lies in the depth we know how to give it and… in the time we want to dedicate to it.”

The exhibition

The exhibition opens with a work by Gregory Mahoney, Time Study (2000) in which twenty letters in oxidised steel and soot compose the inscription Time exists in the mind, questioning the public, right from the start of the visit, on the value of time. Franco Monti‘s small sculpture with the evocative title Emerging time (2002) follows, reminding us that time advances, proceeds and precedes us. The investigation continues with works by Allan Graham, Susan Kaiser Vogel, Grenville Davey and William Metcalf, works with no certain time coordinates, which tell of a metaphysical and absolute time. We then move on to the concept of time as duration with the artists who have most obsessively measured linear and progressive time: Hanne Darboven, On Kawara, Jan Dibbets, Franco Vimercati, but also with Walter De Maria, Cioni Carpi, Maurizio Mochetti and Robert Tiemann. 

Among the curiosities of the section is the work One Million Years by On Kawara, which involves the reading of one million years, written in the form of dates in ten large volumes, and which will be the subject of a live performance open to the public (to apply, write to faibiumo@fondoambiente.it).

In the works of Vincenzo Agnetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Stephan Dean, Lawrence Carroll and Ron Griffin, time is understood as a fragment, closely linked to the biographical element: by resorting to precise geographical and temporal coordinates, these authors represent places of memory, of remembrance. 

The exhibition continues with sound installations by Michael Brewster and moving machines by Piero Fogliati; the two artists create instruments and mechanisms that emit sonic vibrations and break the silent flow of time, allowing us to hear its noise. 

The room dedicated to Paolo Fogliati is completed by Fleximofono 2002 (harmonic steel springs, iron plate – 256 x 35.5 x 35.5 cm), a work donated to FAI in 2024 by the artist’s son Paolo Fogliati. In the small stable in the Rustici wing, the installation The Eighth Investigation, Proposition 3 by Joseph Kossuth welcomes the spectator, invited to perform the action of time by sitting at a table and leafing through the notebooks on display, while on the walls run the hands of twenty-four clocks marking different times.

The Visiting Route

The tour concludes with a screening of Buster Keaton’s film Seven Chances, a silent film from 1925, an extraordinary performance by the American actor who, in comic and surreal sequences, transferred to the medium of film the sense of time that the exhibition told its audience.

Nel tempo is an exhibition project dedicated to the themes dear to Giuseppe Panza, which intends to enhance a nucleus of works belonging to the recent donation of Rosa Giovanna Magnifico and the Panza family to FAI (2022). The exhibition also makes use of temporary loans from the Panza Collection in Mendrisio (Switzerland).

The exhibition is accompanied by an extensively illustrated catalogue, published by Mainz Editore, with an introductory text by Gabriella Belli and critical entries by Marta Spanevello. Two valuable essays enrich the volume: one by Italo Calvino Il crollo del tempo (on drawings by Saul Steinberg) from 1977, and the other by Ivano Dionigi with an excerpt from the book Segui il tuo Demone from 2020, both kindly granted for this publication.

The exhibition route is also accompanied by podcasts explaining the meaning of the works to the visitor and is enriched by suggestions from philosophers and men of letters, easy keys to interpretation that lead to reflection on the theme of time that has been questioning mankind for centuries. 
Artists in the exhibition: Vincenzo Agnetti, Michael Brewster, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Cioni (Eugenio) Carpi, Lawrence Carroll, Hanne Darboven, Grenville Davey, Walter De Maria, Stephen Dean, Jan Dibbets, Piero Fogliati, Allan Graham, Ron Griffin, Susan Kaiser Vogel, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, Gregory Mahoney, William Metcalf, Maurizio Mochetti, Franco Monti, Robert E. Tiemann, Franco Vimercati, Ian Wilson.