On Friday, Oct. 10 and Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025, from 6 to 8 p.m., at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, Luca Rossi will present the action The fantastic paper ball. 100 years in the palm of your hand, conceived on the occasion of the Rome Quadrennial 2025. The initiative, supported by Finestre sull’Arte and located outside the official program of the event, aims to invite the public to reflect on the value of contemporary art, its economic and symbolic mechanisms, and the way it acts daily in our lives.
The action, described by Rossi as an intimate and at the same time collective experience, starts with a simple and provocative image: a paper ball held in the palm of the hand, a metaphor for a century of history and value encapsulated in a minimal gesture. Through this act, the artist investigates the boundaries between economics, perception and individual responsibility, questioning the art system as a reflection of the mechanisms of contemporary finance.
“The Palazzo delle Esposizioni,” Rossi writes in the presentation, "looks like the Spanish State Mint where the protagonists of the House of Paper entered to print money. The art system works in the same way as a central bank printing money: how does this system of speculation really work? What antidote? How do we find the value of art in our everyday lives? We are surrounded by contemporary art, if we don’t take care of contemporary art contemporary art will take over our lives and there will be trouble."
The project is thus somewhere between performance, lecture and conceptual workshop, in line with the artist’s research, which has always been committed to exploring the limits of communication and the processes by which meaning is constructed in the society of the image. Participation in the action is free, but with mandatory registration via documenta.live/quadriennale_di_roma_2025_luca_rossi. A video presentation can be seen on the artist’s Instagram profile.
The fantastic paper ball anticipates Luca Rossi’s Masterclass 2026 and is ideally connected to the action that will be carried out in Turin on the occasion of Artissima 2025, titled Tu qui non puoi parlare (You can’t talk here), where the theme of silence and exclusion will become the subject of artistic investigation.
Behind the name Luca Rossi lies a collective project born in 2009, defined by Fabio Cavallucci as “the most interesting artistic personality in Italy.” Rossi presents himself as an artist, blogger, critic and curator, but also as a critical and controversial figure in the art system, committed to stimulating daily debate on the social and political role of contemporary artistic production.
From his reflections spread through the main art magazines to his constant activity on social media (over 200,000 accounts reached every month), Luca Rossi has built a language that mixes analysis, irony and provocation. In 2016 he founded the Luca Rossi Art Academy & Coaching, a training and dissemination platform(www.documenta.live) dedicated to reflecting on art as a tool for individual and collective awareness. Today Rossi collaborates with Finestre sull’Arte, the second most-read art magazine in Italy with about two million monthly views, and with Spaghetti Boost, a new art and current affairs magazine that experiments with innovative communication formats. His artistic and critical path has been repeatedly recognized by leading figures in the art world. In 2014 Giacinto Di Pietrantonio called him “a promise of the contemporary,” comparing him to the Vanessa Beecroft of the 1990s. At the same time, critic Angela Vettese declared that, after reading his texts, he had decided to devote himself exclusively to theory, abandoning artistic practice.+
His exhibition activity, official and unofficial, has developed among heterogeneous institutions and contexts, from international museums to independent spaces. In recent years Rossi has participated in BienNolo (Milan, 2023), SIX Gallery (2023), the Itaglia Pavilion at the Magazzeno Art Gaze in Bologna (2024), and Un Cretin in Berlin at Campanini Contemporary (2024). In 2025 he is present at Musée de l’OHM in Bologna, Booming Contemporary, and SMACH, International Biennial of the Dolomites.
Through these experiences, Luca Rossi continues to explore the boundaries between art and criticism, visibility and anonymity, building a constantly changing project that feeds on collaborations, public actions and digital interventions.
With The Fantastic Paper Ball, the artist returns to question the audience about the very nature of value, inviting them to take in - literally - one hundred years of history and thought to ask themselves what it means to produce, share and understand art today.
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| Luca Rossi brings "The Fantastic Paper Ball" to Rome for Quadrennial 2025 |
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