Francesco Pacelli
Nessun Boato
LC Contemporary
Via Rosolino Pilo, 14
Milan, 20129, IT
Review by Vittoria Martinotti
Inesorabile (a few billion years isn’t actually that much), IV . Oil stick on board. 29×34 cm. 2026. Courtesy the artist and LC Contemporary Milan.
“Nessun Boato” does not announce itself. It settles, unfolding as a controlled experiment in origins. It lowers the volume of the room until perception becomes almost architectural. Francesco Pacelli transforms the gallery into a threshold space—neither celestial nor terrestrial, neither laboratory nor shrine. A vacuum, but not an empty one. A silence dense with origin.
At the core of the exhibition lies a specific image, Abraham Van Diepenbeeck’s seventeenth-century engraving Chaos. In early modern cosmology, “chaos” did not yet signify disorder in the contemporary sense. The term indicated a primordial condition, unformed matter preceding divine organization. In the context of Baroque theology and proto-scientific speculation’s visual culture, chaos was often depicted as a dense vortex of clouds, lightning, animal presences, and elemental turbulence. It was not randomness, but latency, a generative matrix awaiting articulation. Science and spirituality were still entangled, cosmogenesis was at once metaphysical and material.
Accordingly, Pacelli does not stage chaos as spectacle, nor as rupture. Instead, he approaches it as a problem of structure: how does form emerge from the undifferentiated, and what role does perception play in that emergence? Pacelli reactivates this vision, but he does so through subtraction. The white cube, often accused of sterility, becomes here an ally. Its rigid geometry, its polished neutrality, allows chaos to be staged as something hyper-clean, estranged from its own mythic excess, almost aseptic. What in Van Diepenbeeck swirled with Baroque density is now distilled into calibrated forms, precise surfaces, suspended gestures. Chaos, reconfigured as immaculate. And precisely for this reason, unfamiliar.
Some things need an impulse to move, III. Bronze. 16x19x7 cm. 2026. Courtesy the artist and LC Contemporary Milan.
The opening body of works Inesorabile (a few billion years isn’t actually that much) orbit the Sun—not as symbol of vitality, but as finite engine. Pacelli renders the star as a temporal paradox: incomprehensibly ancient, yet already condemned. The light he paints feels less like illumination than exposure. We are confronted with an uncomfortable horizon, the eventual exhaustion of the very system that sustains us. Here, chaos is not explosion but inevitability, entropy as silent condition.
If the Sun embodies cosmic finitude, Tra la fine e l’inizio il nulla stelliforme shifts scale. This meditation extends into a constellation of flies aligned along a golden rail. Once terrestrial, now sublimated, the insect sheds its biological specificity and becomes stellar sign. Pacelli touches a recurring thread in his practice: the transformation of matter through symbolic displacement. As in his previous investigations, where alchemical thinking intersects with technological imagination, form is never fixed, it migrates between states. The fly becomes star; the organic becomes diagram.
The gesture recalls his earlier works, where bronze, ritual references, and speculative cosmologies intertwined. Pacelli has long moved within a territory where alchemy is not nostalgia but methodology. Bronze is not simply material, it is transmutation solidified. The sculptures here, organic, slightly asymmetrical, hovering between growth and mineralization, evoke biological structures arrested mid-mutation. They feel like remnants of an experiment whose outcome remains suspended. Alchemy, historically, sought the purification of matter into gold. But it also proposed a parallel transformation of consciousness. Pacelli’s bronzes seem to inhabit this double register. Their surfaces, porous and darkened, suggest that becoming is never smooth, it requires fracture, it requires impulse.
Tra la fine e l’inizio il nulla stelliforme, I . Bronze. 30x180x53 cm. 2026. Courtesy the artist and LC Contemporary Milan.
The exhibition culminates in Lassù, a milioni di kilometri, risiede l’immaginifico, a spatial intervention that restricts vision. A panel seals the space, leaving only a narrow slit through which a distant, almost extraterrestrial landscape can be glimpsed. A chimerical figure rests within it, neither fully organic nor entirely fabricated. The device recalls scientific instrumentation, yet it produces no objective data, what is activated instead is projection. We look, and in looking, we construct.
This attention to perception in the show is consistent with Pacelli’s longstanding method of subtraction. Rather than imposing form, he allows it to adapt, to camouflage itself within the given conditions. In his earlier work, the invisible was never absence but latency, a field waiting to be decoded. Here, that inquiry sharpens, chaos is not something external to be mastered, it is the undifferentiated field from which meaning is continuously extracted.
What makes “Nessun Boato” compelling is not its cosmological ambition, but its restraint. Pacelli resists the temptation to dramatize the abyss, but instead sanitizes it. He renders chaos so polished, so spatially disciplined, that it feels estranged from its own mythology. The white cube becomes a crucible, within its rigid coordinates, primordial turbulence is refined into form. The rumble promised by the title never arrives and that is the point. Chaos, here, does not erupt, it hums beneath the surface: contained, lucid, waiting for the mind to give it structure.