‘What the Eye Brought Back’ Reflects on Seeing as Care

Since founding P420 in Bologna 15 years ago, Alessandro Pasotti and Fabrizio Padovani have steadily made a name for themselves for their discerning, attentive and generous eye, spotlighting lesser-known artists across generations, borders and genres. Their gallery is a vessel for their expansive approach: frequently collaborating with curators, they are actively engaged in the international art scene while also nurturing local artists.

The gallery’s latest exhibition, the group show ‘What the Eye Brought Back’, is a case in point. A travel scrapbook of sorts, it brings together 11 artists from four continents whom the gallerists have encountered through the years and who left a deep impression on them. None, it should be mentioned, are as yet represented by the gallery. Much like the rhizomatic webs of memories we might collect on a journey and treasure ever after, there is no particular sequence or hierarchy to the works on view, yet an overarching shared sensibility unites them like an invisible thread.

Palestinian artist Majd Abdel Hamid’s How long was the thread (2020–21) is a mesmerizing, diminutive piece of embroidery: deep red, blue, orange, yellow and light green cotton threads forming a concentric circular pattern, stitched over repeatedly onto a piece of raw white fabric. Created in response to the devastating 2020 port explosion in Beirut, where the artist lives, it resembles a wound blossoming from a sheet of gauze. The work is part of the larger series ‘800 meters’ (2020–22), a reference to the countless stitches performed on the more than 7,000 people who were injured in the blast. It reads as a charged archaeological trace of the catastrophe, the repetitive, compulsive gesture of stitching heightening both the ongoing sense of anguish and the fragile attempt to mend a collective wound.

A few steps away, Mongolian-born, Turin-based artist Bekhbaatar Enkhtur’s captivating beeswax sculpture Coccodrilli (Crocodiles, 2025) stands low to the ground. Stemming from the artist’s research into textiles in Indonesia and Ghana, this life-sized work offers a contemporary twist on the Ghanaian adinkra symbol Funtunfunefu-Denkyemfunefu, representing two conjoined crocodiles, denoting unity in diversity and the futility of conflict in the context of a shared world. Here, the two mythical creatures, eternally joined at the stomach, are depicted with a golf ball lying in the open mouth of one of the twins, the plastic’s artificiality in jarring contrast to the organic pliability of beeswax. Frozen in a suspended game, their mouths intertwined, the crocodiles appear as an allegory for the elusiveness of resolution in conflicts, which more often than not end in deadlock.

In the middle of the second room stands Untitled (2025), an introspective installation by Chinese conceptual artist He Xiangyu. Part punk assemblage, part ethereal memorial, the work encapsulates the nine years the artist spent in Berlin, during which he collected discarded glass bottles around the city. These beautiful, time-worn vessels, bearing imperfections and faint traces of labels, are lovingly exhibited inside a wooden cabinet and atop the dilapidated architectural form that sits above it, bearing witness to forgotten lives in a rapidly changing city. 

Whether recording trauma or heritage – like in the intimate paintings of Iva Lulashi or the politically charged clay-on-canvas works of the Maya Kaqchikel artist Edgar Calel – or immortalizing the things we take for granted, like a riveting view from an aeroplane (Hamra Abbas’s marble-inlay Aerial Studies 4, 2023), the invisible thread that weaves through the show could perhaps best be described as one of preservation or bearing witness. Each artist offers us a portal into their own reality, not merely as an archival gesture but as a jolt, a call to attention amid rapid change and the erosion of focus, urging us to pause and re-examine the world around us.

‘What the Eye Brought Back’ is on view at P420, Bologna, until 15 November

_{Main image: He Xiangyu, Untitled (3 Pieces), 2025, bronze, aluminum, stainless steel, ceramic, resin, wood, plastic, iron, MSG, glass, 79 × 45 × 310 cm. Courtesy: the artist and P420, Bologna; photograph: Carlo Favero}