Giovanni Boccaccio, the writer born in Certaldo and whose 650th anniversary of death is celebrated this year, will be the main theme of the five exhibitions of CertaldoArte25, a contemporary art event organized by the Municipality of Certaldo and sponsored by the Regional Council, with the coordination and exhibition design by Exponent, now in its fifth edition. The event, which will take place in the rooms of Palazzo Pretorio from Saturday, March 1, to January 18, 2026, will feature nine Italian and international artists as its protagonists.
On May 17, the exhibition Why create a work of art when it’s so beautiful just to dream it? by Arthur Duff (Wiesbaden, 1973) and Antonio Marchetti Lamera (Bergamo, 1964) will open. The exhibition explores Boccaccian places through light installations, paintings, and a video work.
The exhibition proposes a dialogue with the themes and places dear to the Tuscan writer. When Pier Paolo Pasolini, in the guise of the “best pupil of Giotto,” finds himself in front of the fresco he is creating in the Neapolitan church of Santa Chiara, he addresses the painting and the viewers, whispering: Why create a work of art when it’s so beautiful just to dream it? This is the unresolved epilogue of Pasolini’s Decameron (1971), where the director intended to reinterpret Boccaccio’s storytelling, delving into the popular world and its jargon, its stories, its few resources but also its proud modesty, where the only wealth is found in dreams, imagination, and sometimes illusions. In the works of the two artists on display, the question posed in the title directs attention towards the form and the status of images, exploring the ability of each work to stand on the threshold between representation and invention, between memory and a hallucinatory, dreamlike vision.
The paintings of Antonio Marchetti Lamera, starting from a photographic research on the city’s medieval buildings and their historical-architectural stratification, plastically elaborate the intersection between the solids and voids of the masonry masses. They overlay the solid structures of a building with its shadowed areas, reflections, and immaterial, distorting projections.
Arthur Duff’s work is composed of light and with light, always understood as an insert or an implant embedded in the flesh of history, with a material and immaterial component that is both doubtful, solid yet evanescent, stable and vibrating. In his use of ropes, intertwined threads, elastic weavings, and neon, sculpture becomes a network that expands, sometimes descending from the ceiling like a fallen angel or as a hypothesis of ascent, other times tangling on the floor and tracing the ground like roots. In the luminous component of each installation, letters, words devoid of narration or sententia (“No plot,” as one sculpture is titled), ambiguous information without handles, exits, or solutions are hidden. It is space that is the true empty, hollow, and dark object, sometimes cosmic—especially in works dedicated to celestial bodies, meteors, and comets—where visions occur, where dreams are made, or where the mind pursues an idea of transcendence and infinity.
