Non voltarti adesso (Don’t Look Now) is a solo exhibition by artist Chiara Calore.
The exhibition’s title adopts the literal translation of the original English *Don’t Look Now*—the famous film by Nicolas Roeg set in Venice, the city where Chiara Calore received her training. More than a cinematic homage, *Non voltarti adesso* evokes a state of perception: an invitation impossible to heed, as everything along the exhibition path seems to compel the visitor to retrace their steps and seek out what has just slipped from view.
The architecture of the exhibition space becomes an integral part of the project. A constellation of portraits accompanies the visitor along the large corridors that define the first floor. These faces seem to observe, wait, or call out—or perhaps cast their gaze elsewhere, as if reacting to something just out of frame. Their expressions, often suspended between a scream and silence, between weeping and ecstasy, create a narrative tension that runs through the entire journey.
Images recur like flashbacks. A gesture resurfaces in another room, a gaze finds its reflection elsewhere, and one face seems to recall another. Through a continuous interplay of references, mirroring, and variations, Chiara Calore’s painting constructs a narrative that unfolds through memory rather than chronology, and through intuition rather than linear storytelling.
Rather than focusing on individual works, *Non voltarti adesso* is built around the behavior of the gaze. The visitor’s gaze is the exhibition’s true medium: it is compelled to retrace its steps, recognize a previously encountered expression, pursue a detail that reappears elsewhere, and constantly draw connections between distant images. Visual memory thus becomes the mechanism that holds the entire exhibition journey together. In some paintings, the pictorial surface seems to crack like porcelain weathered by time; in others, color slides down the face like a tear, transforming the skin into a fragile, unstable landscape. The human figure thus becomes a site where vulnerability and resilience, presence and dissolution coexist.
While corridors serve as spaces of thresholds and encounters, the rooms open onto a broader panorama of images: choral scenes, apparitions, suspended episodes, and thematic clusters that expand upon the tensions suggested by the faces encountered moments earlier. Each setting develops its own atmosphere, as if those initial gazes were finding their counter-shot—room by room.
