Until January 11, 2026, the Guarnacci Etruscan Museum in Volterra is hosting The Reflected Spouses. Paolo Gioli in Volterra, an exhibition project that ideally brings artist Paolo Gioli (Sarzano, 1942 - Lendinara, 2022) back to the Etruscan city forty years after the first presentation of his works inspired by the museum’s collection. The exhibition, promoted by the Municipality of Volterra, Fondazione Musei Senesi, Municipal Museums of Volterra and GIAN - Gruppo Fotografico Volterra, with the support of the Monte dei Paschi di Siena Foundation and Autolinee Toscane as mobility partners, is part of the program of the Etruscan Project 85/25, promoted by the Region of Tuscany, which celebrates the cultural season inaugurated in 1985 and its impact on the enhancement of Etruscan heritage.
The exhibition marks a symbolic return and at the same time a reflection on the relationship between contemporary art and archaeology, memory and identity. Paolo Gioli, who died in 2022, was an artist capable of crossing painting, photography and experimental cinema witha freedom that always challenged the boundaries of languages. His presence in Volterra today is a way to return to the city a significant part of his path and to reactivate a dialogue between his works and the ancient Etruscan testimonies that had inspired them.
The exhibition brings together a corpus of Polaroids and an artist’s video, selected from those that Gioli had presented between 1984 and 1985 in the exhibitions Il volto inciso and Gli sposi riflessi, hosted then at Palazzo dei Priori. These are works that, through superimpositions, transparencies and splitting, relate the living faces of contemporary subjects to those carved on Etruscan cinerary urns housed in the museum. Gioli draws hybrid images from them, in which time is layered and the photographic material becomes a meeting place between past and present. Ancient figures seem to awaken from a millennial sleep, while modern faces offer themselves to a form of metamorphosis, dissolving into stone and taking on its texture.
The artist himself had described his vision in 1984 in words that today sound like a poetic manifesto of his work: “I thought of rendering the ashen faces above the curiously TV-shaped sarcophagi as alive.” A statement that already contains the idea of transforming photography into a gesture of symbolic restitution, capable of breathing life back into what time has rendered immobile. In his images, the “unknown dead” of the Etruscan world find a kind of renewed identity, a face in which memory is intertwined with imagination.
For Fabrizio Burchianti, director of the Guarnacci Etruscan Museum, the exhibition represents “an experience of profound value,” capable of revealing the relevance of Gioli’s gaze and the originality of his approach to ancient statuary. The works born from the museum’s urns and sarcophagi demonstrate how contemporary creativity can return new readings of the archaeological heritage, keeping alive a dialogue between different eras and sensibilities.
Thus, the exhibition is proposed not as a simple retrospective, but as an exercise in temporal connection. Gioli’s Polaroids, with their fragile texture and experimental character, become fragments of visual memory that dialogue with the sculpted surfaces of two thousand years ago. The matter of photography - that immediate and imperfect patina that arises from the direct contact between light and support - here takes on a ritual value, in which the image is not only representation but an act of presence.
Gioli’s research on instant photography has always been accompanied by an interest in technique as a symbolic language. The artist has defined the Polaroid as a “wet incunabulum of modern history,” emphasizing how craft gesture and technological invention coexist in it. Likewise, his use of pinhole and manual printing processes translates an idea of photography as a living body, capable of holding time and returning it in the form of an image.
Born in Sarzano (Rovigo) in 1942, Gioli had studied painting and experienced a formative period in New York in 1968, when the American art scene was experimenting with new forms of language between performance, video and conceptual photography. Upon returning to Italy, he chose to devote himself to vision research, building his own camera tools and inventing autonomous photographic techniques. His work, refractory to any classification, has always moved on the border between body and image, science and poetry, light and matter.
The presence of his works in Volterra, in the context of the Guarnacci Museum, is not only meant to be a historical commemoration, but also an opportunity to reflect on how contemporary art can become a tool for interpreting the past. In this sense, the exhibition is fully in the spirit of the Etruscan Project 85/25, which the Region of Tuscany has promoted in collaboration with the Fondazione Musei Senesi, AMAT - Association of Archaeological Museums and Parks of Tuscany, the Province of Siena and the Regional Secretariat of the Ministry of Culture.
The initiative aims to celebrate the cultural season started in 1985, when Tuscany promoted a new vision of archaeology as a tool for territorial identity and dialogue with contemporaneity. Forty years later, that program is revived in a network of events and exhibitions involving museums, institutions and artists, with the aim of relaunching a way of looking at the Etruscans not as a static testimony, but as a living heritage and a source of inspiration for the present. Paolo Gioli in Volterra is thus part of a broader path of reflection on how Etruscan culture continues to resonate in today’s sensibilities. The artist’s works, suspended between photography and sculpture, between human face and stone effigy, aim to show how memory can turn into visual language, and how archaeology, read through art, becomes an emotional as well as cognitive experience.
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| Paolo Gioli returns to Volterra: a dialogue between face, time and Etruscan memory |
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