On Saturday, October 10, 2026, the STORIECONTEMPORANEE project, curated by Anna Cochetti, in the Studio Ricerca e Documentazione space at Via Poerio 16/B, hosts a double solo exhibition by Goffredo Adinolfi, “Pugilatori. Sguardi,” and Paolo Bielli, “Danzando nel ghiaccio.” In a sort of magnetic face-to-face encounter, metaphorical gazes and symbolic boxing gloves intertwine to construct—through the intensity of the former’s black-and-white photographs, the latter’s drawings and color—a penetrating investigation and a highly personal narrative around boxers, boxing, and the ring, embraced as a tool in a painstaking quest to reveal identities, first social, then ultimately individual.
The double solo exhibition is accompanied by a critical essay by Andrea Iezzi.
The encounter between the two protagonists—two stories, two backgrounds, two parallel and distinct experiences—in their shared obsession with boxing, a “metaphor for life,” gives rise to the dual solo exhibitions by Goffredo Adinolfi, “Pugilatori. Sguardi” (Pugilators. Looks) and Paolo Bielli, “Danzando nel ghiaccio” (Dancing in the Ice). These exhibitions take the form of a magnetic face-to-face encounter, in which metaphorical gazes and symbolic boxing gloves intersect to construct, through the intensity of the former’s black and white photographs, the latter’s drawings and color, a sharp investigation and a highly personal narrative about boxers, boxing, and the ring, taken as a tool in a painstaking quest to reveal identities, first social, then individual. As in a live fight, the exhibition also engages the gaze, gesture, and action of the spectator, aware that what is being depicted is not just a sport, not just a spectacle. But it is a polyphony of slices of life, captured and captured in the instant of a glance or a dance step.
For Goffredo Adinolfi and Paolo Bielli, in fact, boxing—the socioeconomic context, the history, the experience, the appearance and substance of each of the men and women who decide to don the gloves—is a life choice, involving first and foremost their history, their experience, the appearance and substance that for decades have led one to don the photographic eye to investigate and understand, the other to germinate an inexhaustible, changing vision, drawn and multiplied.
“The dialogue between Paolo Bielli’s drawings and Goffredo Adinolfi’s photographs will allow us to look at boxing with new eyes. A world of desires, irony, and hopes. It will be the autobiography of every viewer.”
Photographs and drawings that dialogue here in a sort of dance of gazes.
On display are the two artist books created for the occasion.
