This name of mine is not new to me.

This Name of Mine Is Not New to Me — the solo exhibition by Giancarlo Galeotti, first presented a few months ago at the Palazzo del Debbio in Massa Marittima — arrives in Terni in a version adapted to the setting of the Apollo and Daphne Room at Palazzo Carrara, featuring frescoes painted in the mid-17th century by Girolamo Troppa.
For Tempus Vitae’s CAU project, entrusting the dialogue with the room’s pictorial cycle solely to sculptors is a choice rooted in mutual respect between artist and space. We have always entrusted this challenge to sculptors who inhabit and animate the space through vastly different approaches and ideas; there is no one-size-fits-all formula, and the engagement begins anew each time. It is a dialogue spanning eras, timeframes, styles, ideas, materials, and souls—one that constantly breathes new and unique life and light into Palazzo Carrara. The interaction plays out through works installed directly on the floor, ensuring an unobstructed, clearly visible connection between the forms and movement of the sculptures and the swirling energy of the fresco cycle.
Galeotti inhabits the space with works—crafted from raw, twisted, expressive ceramic that is at once substantial yet slender and soaring—that differ markedly from those of the artists who came before him.
His approach stands in stark contrast to the experiences the room underwent during previous CAU interventions: Akelo’s steel modules, opened up by thousands of laser cuts, in February 2025; the September “invasion” of ceramics by Giacinto Cerone—whipped, punched, and then finished with a lustrous glaze in every conceivable color; and now, in 2026, the work of Adriano Candelori, exploring memory and traditional crafts. Akelo’s work is painstaking, mathematical, and quantum-like; for Giacinto, it is physical, aggressive, and violent—a fierce hand-to-hand struggle in which he seems intent on tearing the soul from the matter; for Candelori, it is imbued with humanity and respect for those figures society no longer deems useful; and for the slender Giancarlo, it is tense yet gentle and poetic—possessing a depth that transcends the physical, as he ultimately yields shreds of his own soul to the clay.
“Giancarlo Galeotti is an architect, sculptor, and engraver from Massa Marittima.
Defining him as a contemporary artist is complicated in an era when the primary activity of those who produce (or believe they are producing) any form of art is to tailor their work to the mechanisms governing the market.
He is something else entirely, and he lives by a different set of values. Once you meet him, there is no turning back: you must reset and re-examine your ways, your yardsticks, your sensibilities, and your very soul, adapting them all to align with his.”