Alessandro Manfrin "Bomboniera" at Gian Marco Casini Gallery, Livorno

Author: Michela Ceruti

In The Invisible Cities (1972), Italo Calvino wrote that the city does not tell its past, but contains it as “the lines of a hand.”[1] Alessandro Manfrin’s practice finds its place along the same indiscernible lines. Streets, façades, and abandoned objects accumulate traces of daily life, gestures, and histories that often go unnoticed. Manfrin’s interventions are minimal, sometimes nearly invisible. Yet, they possess the subtle power to defy expectations. What has lost its use becomes functional again, what has been hidden becomes visible, and what is normally discarded is in full view. From the street mattresses of Hard Work, Soft Dreams (2023), which calmly narrate human presence and vulnerability, to the residues of ephemeral urbanism captured in the Daily Paintings (San Vittore) (2023), Manfrin’s work asks viewers to attend to the poetics embedded in the everyday.

The series Milano Palazzi (2021) is quietly present in one of the non-exhibition spaces of Gian Marco Casini Gallery in Livorno, where Manfrin’s solo exhibition “Bomboniera” is currently on view. Digitally realized photographs of Milanese palaces and skyscrapers, transferred onto watercolor paper, juxtapose the rigorously modular geometry of urban architecture with the fluid, organic textures of watercolor. Here, structure converses with the form, and the familiar cityscape is transformed into a meditation on memory, perception, and associative imagination. One might recognize a vaulting façade; the undulating lines, evocative of water rippling over tiles, a suggestive zoomed perspective of a swimming pool, linking architecture with memory, the public with private, intertwining the seen with the remembered.

What the artist seems to ask of us, the viewers, is not to simply look at the city, but to perceive it anew: to read the palimpsest of human life embodied in its surfaces, to notice its fragments, and to recognize the silent poetry in the most easily overlooked.

This invitation to reimagine the familiar finds a natural continuation in “Bomboniera.” Take Untitled (elevator) (2025), a two-minute and fifty-two-second loop filmed inside the lift at Milan’s Porta Garibaldi subway station one morning on the artist’s way to work. The inside light was already malfunctioning, he explained to me, and he further dimmed the brightness of his iPhone, transforming the elevator’s floor into a starry night. What unfolds is not so much the image of a public utility then a vision of the galaxy: a moving field of light and shadow, punctuated only occasionally by the mechanical rotation of the lens that betrays the scene’s human construction.

Here, the banal turns into the infinite, echoing Emily Dickinson’s intuition that the vast can be glimpsed in the most ordinary of places: a cloud, a rut, a snowflake.[2] The elevator floor, no more than a functional surface trodden by countless commuters, suddenly opens into a cosmos; a flicker of faulty light becomes a constellation. Manfrin does not fabricate illusions rather creates conditions where the ordinary slips into the extraordinary, where familiar mutates into something vast, uncanny, and strangely intimate.

If Untitled (elevator) turns a flicker of light into a constellation, the nine-sculpture series Bomboniere (2025) performs a similar functional inversion within a sculptural form. The architectural models, built from PVC and other so-called “low-grade” materials, rise within the gallery space as miniature architectural models. From a distance, they gleam as glass towers– precarious skyscrapers, luminous and brittle, as if they might shatter with the slightest touch. It is only when closely approaching them that their material reality becomes apparent: these are not crystalline façades, but plastics and industrial scraps, substances of everyday use, fabricated into apparitions of transparency. What seemed monumental reveals itself as cheap and enduring, fragile in appearance, yet stubborn in character.

The title of the series–– and of the exhibition itself–– is decisive. In Italian, a bomboniera is like a small token, given at weddings or other important celebrations, an object that languishes after the event and testifies to the fact of having taken place. At once trivial and cherished, fragile and durable, the bomboniera is aftertaste charged with memory– proof that something happened, that it was shared, that it left a trace.

Manfrin’s Bomboniere function in this very same way. They are reminders rather than declarations, keepsakes rather than monuments, holding within their slight forms the paradox of persistence. Their modest, almost indestructible materials embody the strange survival of what culture considers lowly or discardable. Georges Perec wrote that the challenge is not to ask “what is remarkable,” but instead to interrogate the habitual, to grasp the infraordinary[3] that persists beneath our notice.

Pimple Patches (2025) further extends this same logic of attention to what is cast off, this time on a more intimate scale. In the series, Manfrin gathers discarded lampshades –– salvaged from sidewalks, dumpsters, or waste sites –– and carefully covers their worn surfaces with translucent stickers designed to conceal blemishes on the human skin. Once merely functional, these patches spread in playful symbolic forms, becoming hearts, stars, and turning self-care into an ornamental and cute substance. Applied in dense constellations, they transform battered landscapes into luminous objects, recalling the flickering night lights from little children’s bedrooms, projecting makeshift galaxies across the ceiling.

The gesture is both humorous and moving: the pockmarked surface of an old object treated with patient attention, its damage overlaid with tiny stars. Rather than restoring the lampshades to their former states, Manfrin offers them a different afterlife; one marked by affection, by a refusal to discard, by the possibility of beauty persisting in what has been overlooked.

What emerges across Manfrin’s practice is not a monument to permanence, but an ethics of attention: a way of insisting on the value of what is cracked, residual, and easily ignored. His works do not proclaim, but whisper, offering fragments, faint galaxies that persist at the edges of perception. To follow this artistic intention is to enter a city made not of grand gestures, but of quiet survivals, where memory clings to surfaces and discarded objects shimmer with improbable futures. If the city contains its past “like the lines of a hand,” then Manfrin suggests we read it: not as destiny inscribed, but as an invitation to notice, to tend, and to imagine otherwise.

[1] Italo Calvino, The Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974, p. 11.

[2] Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by R.W. Franklin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.

[3] Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Edited and translated by John Sturrock. London: Penguin, 1997, p. 210.

Alessandro Manfrin "Bomboniera" at Gian Marco Casini Gallery, Livorno, is on view through November 8, 2025.

About the author: Michela Ceruti is a writer based in Milan. She is the managing editor of Flash Art Magazine.

Alessandro Manfrin "Bomboniera" at Gian Marco Casini Gallery, Livorno

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