From September 19 to November 8, 2026,the former Convent of San Francesco inBagnacavallo, in the province of Ravenna, will host *Non voltarti adesso*, a solo exhibition by Chiara Calore, curated by Milovan Farronato. The exhibition is sponsored by the Municipality of Bagnacavallo and organized by the Museo Civico delle Cappuccine, with the support of the Emilia-Romagna Region and a contribution from Hera. The opening is scheduled for Saturday, September 19, at 6:00 p.m., while the press preview will take place on Thursday, September 24, at 11:30 a.m.
The title is a literal translation of the original English title *Don’t Look Now*, the famous film by Nicolas Roeg set in Venice, the city where Calore grew up. However, the cinematic reference is not a direct homage to the film, but rather a starting point for evoking a specific perceptual state. The invitation not to turn around seems, in fact, impossible to follow: throughout the exhibition, visitors are continually led to retrace their steps and search for what has just escaped their gaze.
The architecture of the former convent thus plays a role in shaping the exhibition. In the large corridors on the first floor, a constellation of portraits accompanies the public, presenting faces that seem to be observing, waiting, calling out, or turning their gaze toward something that remains off-screen. The expressions, suspended between a cry and silence, tears and ecstasy, introduce a narrative tension destined to unfold throughout the rest of the exhibition.
The images recur from one room to another like flashbacks. A gesture resurfaces elsewhere, a gaze finds its reflection, a face seems to evoke another. Through references, mirroring, and variations, Calore’s painting constructs a narrative that proceeds according to a logic grounded more in memory than in chronology, and more in intuition than in linear storytelling.
The behavior of the gaze thus becomes one of the central elements of the project. It is the visitor’s gaze that connects the works, compelling them to recognize expressions they have already encountered, to pursue details that reappear in other spaces, and to establish relationships between distant images. Visual memory thus functions as a mechanism capable of holding the entire journey together.
In some paintings, the surface appears cracked like porcelain weathered by time; in others, color slides down the face like a tear, transforming the skin into a fragile and unstable landscape. The human figure thus becomes the space where vulnerability and resilience, presence and fading, can coexist.
While the corridors represent a threshold and a space for encounters, the rooms expand the repertoire of images with group scenes, apparitions, suspended episodes, and thematic nuclei. Each space develops its own atmosphere and functions as a possible counterpoint to the gazes encountered in the corridors. The catalog, too, is conceived as a special-edition publication created specifically for this occasion. Departing from traditional structure, the volume graphically captures the rhythm of the exhibition and its restless atmosphere, presenting itself as an extension of the exhibition experience rather than mere documentation.
*Don’t Turn Around Now* thus offers a journey through Chiara Calore’s pictorial universe, where each image seems to preserve the memory of another, and every gaze remains present even after it has left the field of vision.
The former Convent of San Francesco, located at Via Vittorio Veneto 1/a, is open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. and from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Admission is free.
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| Chiara Calore brings to Bagnacavallo a style of painting rooted in the memory of the gaze |
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