«Every reader, when reading, reads himself.» — Marcel Proust
The exhibition journey continues with “LIBER LIBER. Where the page ends… the world begins,” the project that Spazio Zero – contemporary art devotes to the transformation of the book in the contemporary era. It brings to the spaces of Serravalle Pistoiese the work of Hannelore Jüterbock, Monograff and Luigi Petracchi, curated by Laura Monaldi, under the patronage of the Tuscany Region, the Municipality of Serravalle Pistoiese, the Municipality of Pistoia, the Municipality of Carmignano and the Municipality of Quarrata.
The project, which shares the spirit of Pistoia, Italian Capital of the Book 2026, continues to question the book as both material page and mental page, physical object and architecture of thought, intimate gesture and shared process. This second exhibition phase shifts the emphasis to the most intimate and transformative dimension of reading, explored through painting, environmental installation and painted architecture.
Hannelore Jüterbock presents a series of paintings dedicated to history stripped of narrative reconstruction. Battles, sieges and landscapes are translated into dense, layered fields of color, in which the event dissolves into emotional charge, echo, and memory deposited in the matter of the paint.
Monograff presents the installation “La Stanza” (The Room), an ideal environment that translates the elementary perimeter of reading into built space. Faithful to the blue two-tone palette that characterizes his/her work, the artist carves three unstable, shifting openings into the wall, which let real light filter through and turn emptiness into image: a gesture that makes visible the moment when the page opens in the mind of the reader.
Luigi Petracchi presents the environmental installation “Non so” (I Don’t Know), a rite of visual and spiritual initiation built around the Socratic maieutic method, in which layered papers, pigments reminiscent of earth and gold, and a female mannequin covered in written bandages form a meditative experience of knowledge as a process of transformation. Alongside the installation, the work “Fata Turchina” (The Blue Fairy) and the series of banners “Conflitti e Armonie” (Conflicts and Harmonies) continue, in different registers, the same alchemical dramaturgy, among symbols, feminine archetypes and figures from tradition.
