Montrer: Pas de crayon, seulement un stylo

From Nightmare to Fabri Fibra

A display of pen drawing · Former students of the Liceo Artistico Francesco Cecioni, Livorno

CURATOR
Michael Rotondi

ARTISTS
Over 20 former students of the Liceo Artistico Francesco Cecioni, Livorno · School year 2023–2024

TECHNIQUE
Pen drawing on paper · Formats: A4, A3, 70×50 cm

PRODUCTION CONTEXT
Liceo Artistico Francesco Cecioni, Livorno · School year 2023–2024

YEAR OF PRODUCTION
2023–2024

PROPOSAL FOR
Effetto Venezia — museum space or exhibition space

NUMBER OF WORKS
Over 20 original works on paper

It’s been almost two years since these girls and boys sat in a classroom at Liceo Cecioni with a sheet of paper in front of them and a pen in hand. No pencil. No erasing. Just the mark, direct, irreversible, honest.

Today they are at university. They study architecture, design, illustration, visual communication, or have taken paths that do not involve art — but the works remain. They remain on paper, they remain beautiful, they remain waiting for a space that would treat them for what they are: artworks, not assignments.

No pencil only pen is the exhibition that I promised them. A promise made in class, with that lightness and seriousness with which important things are said when working together. Here it is.

The thematic perimeter that these works explore is as vast as the imagination of a generation raised among flows of images, algorithms, and anticipated nostalgia. There is Letizia Battaglia reinterpreted in pen, with the documentary weight of her photography translated into manual sign — a gesture that is both homage and appropriation. There are remade posters, where the language of propaganda and militant graphics is reactivated by those who did not live those years but absorbed them through digital archives and collective memory.

There is cinema — frames from films and TV series reconstructed by hand, one by one, as if the only way to truly own an image was to redraw it. Record covers, especially from the pop-punk scene and its visually saturated ink, DIY, xerox imagery. Portraits of musicians — from the contemporary Italian rap scene to the faces of b-movies and horror, old and new — drawn with that affectionate precision reserved for things that are truly loved.

The title of the exhibition is also a technical rule and an aesthetic position. The pen does not forgive. The traced mark exists, settles, remains. Working without a pencil is working without a safety net — and these young people did it with an ease that has more to do with confidence in their own gesture than with acquired technique. This confidence, even before the mark, is the true focus of this exhibition.

The subtitle — From Nightmare to Fabri Fibra — is not a provocation or a generational irony exercise. It is a map. It indicates the cultural territory in which these works live: a territory that does not distinguish between high and low, official culture and subculture, between the face of an 80s horror character and that of an Italian rapper from the 2000s. Everything belongs to the same visual repertoire. Everything deserves the same gaze, the same care, the same slowness of pen drawing.

Asking these young people to redraw an image means asking them to truly look at it. To stop. To understand how it is made. To choose what to keep and what to let go. It is an exercise in visual reading before artistic production — and that’s why the results have the quality they do.

The exhibition is not an end-of-year show or a didactic retrospective. It is an exhibition project with its own curatorial coherence, rhythm, and thesis. The artists are young — some very young when they made these works — but the works are not, in the sense that they do not carry the exhibited fragility and implicit excuse that often accompanies student production. Instead, they bring a certainty of mark that is both the certainty of someone who has something to say and the certainty of someone who knows how to say it, even without fully knowing it.

No pencil only pen wants a museum space or at least a space that matches the quality of these works. Not a space that welcomes them as evidence of a school experience, but a space that welcomes them as art. Because that’s what they are.

Technical notes and setup

The exhibition features over 20 original works on paper, all executed in pen (ballpoint, fineliner, technical pen) on paper in formats A4, A3, and 70×50 cm. The works do not require any specific conservation conditions other than protection from direct light and humidity.

The setup includes framing or mounting under passepartout, with wall placement. The variety of formats allows for flexible hanging solutions, from a single wall with a modular grid to thematic groupings. The curation proposes an organization by thematic areas — documentary photography, posters, cinema, music, horror, and b-movies — with the possibility of cross-connections.

The project is self-sufficient in terms of works and is open to collaborations for exhibition texts, graphic materials, and communication.

The curator

Michael Rotondi is a visual artist and teacher. For over twenty years, he has engaged in an interdisciplinary practice spanning painting, installation, drawing, and process research. He teaches at the Liceo Artistico Francesco Cecioni in Livorno, where he developed the project that led to this exhibition. He is a member of the AroundGaza collective and a board member of the Trossi Uberti Foundation in Livorno. As an artist, he has exhibited in Italy, Europe, Asia, and the United States, with participation in international biennials. His curatorial practice stems from the idea that students’ work — when real work — deserves the same spaces and attention as the work of professional artists.