Alessandro Merlo: Stage Presence - Until April 11, 2026
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Mare Karina presents "Stage Presence" by Alessandro Merlo, on view through April 11, 2026.
Alessandro Merlo solo exhibition Stage Presence at Mare Karina brings together works produced across different phases and projects of Merlo’s career, from portraits shot in London to editorials produced in Milan for both issues of Coriandoli, through to photographs taken at masked parties inside Palazzo Pisani Moretta in Venice. The exhibition design, curated by Mare Karina, unfolds as a natural extension of the material and visual vocabulary running through the artist’s practice: installations, disguises, and scenic props become spatial elements that activate the gallery as a stage, calling visitors into play.
CURATORIAL TEXT
Say hello then wave goodbye
by Milovan Farronato
In Alessandro Merlo’s layered body of work – marked by constant shifts between editorial choices, underground and countercultural scenes, fleeting appearances, and a private gaze – play is never a mere formal device. Rather, it is a way of suspending the time of an image and setting it back into circulation.
At the center of the gallery, Conciati per le feste takes shape as a photographic board game, an editioned work that stages characters, roles, and identities, more than rules or winners. The playing pieces are bodies, masks, figures, each with its own title; the board is a narrative space that does not necessarily lead to an end, but always to a new beginning. Opened like a match already in progress and suddenly interrupted, the game appears in Stage Presence as a device in waiting: not a finished object, but a situation ready to be reactivated.
The idea of play as a symbolic machine has notable and lateral precedents. In Leonora Carrington’s combinatory tables, such as her replica of The Game of Biribissi, images are organized according to spatial and temporal coordinates that do not establish an outcome but instead multiply possible readings. Similarly, in Liliane Lijn’s Power Game, play becomes a social performance: a deck of cards in which words are played, defended, and tested for their symbolic power. In both cases, as in Merlo’s work, play does not entertain; it activates, exposes, and puts under tension what usually remains invisible – meaning, identity, language.
In Merlo’s practice, however, all of this passes through photography and the body, through figures that seem to have stepped out of a set or from a party just ended. It is no coincidence that the exhibition opens in Venice on February 14, during Carnival and Valentine’s Day: a temporal threshold in which disguise and desire, fiction and intimacy, overlap. Stage Presence inhabits precisely this ambiguous space: a serious game, a frozen celebration, a narrative that does not close. The pieces remain still, yet they look forward. The game is not over; it is simply ready to begin again.
If the exhibition presents itself as a suspended match, Carnival is its natural time – not as a local tradition or seasonal frame, but as a symbolic regime founded on inversion, on the temporary suspension of rules, on the authorization to be otherwise. As in certain rites of passage – one might think of the “crossing the line” ceremony of the U.S. Marines, where crossing the equator entails a reversal of roles, hierarchies, and identities – Carnival does not destroy order, but suspends it, theatricalizes it, renders it visible precisely at the moment it seems to dissolve. It is a regulated freedom, a shared fiction, a time on the other side of the equator and of conventions, destined to end but capable, in the meantime, of bringing to the surface desires, excesses, and postures otherwise unconfessable.
It is within this space that Merlo’s images find their ideal temperature. Disguised bodies, costumes, performative gestures, and roles assumed for play or necessity refer less to Venetian Carnival as an iconographic repertoire than to a broader, extracontinental and supra-historical energy: Carnival understood as a centrifugal force, as a scene in which judgment becomes collective, identity negotiable, and style a public declaration.
The eight photographs on view share this same logic: they do not present the mask as concealment, but as exposure, as a conscious act of staging. In this sense, Venice becomes a threshold rather than a place – a point of passage toward a symbolic elsewhere where rules loosen, play turns serious, and presence, even before the image, is already performance.
All the figures in the photographs thus seem to emerge from a new board as characters who have left the game but still carry its rules, poses, and excitement. None of them illustrate the board game itself; rather, they represent its possible further narratives, its side scenes, its unexpected encounters.
In Siamo coriandoli, bodies appear as festive fragments that exist only in relation to others, in proximity and contact. In A che gioco stai giocando?, the gaze becomes more frontal and interrogative, as if the viewer were being asked to declare their own position, to choose a role, to understand differences (not merely in a didactic sense). Drama Club stages a more explicit theatricality, made of heightened gestures, studied postures, and a performance that does not hide its own artificiality. Galassia opens onto a more cosmic and artificial register, where costume and makeup enable a floating, weightless identity. Trimalcione 2000, with its festive and distinctly Venetian connotations, condenses excess, rituality, and collective staging into a single image. All these photographs, though belonging to different series and moments, coexist like panels of a large comic strip without a predetermined order, connected more by atmosphere than by plot. In Self Portrait, the artist steps onto the stage himself, taking on the logic of disguise and self-representation, in the resolute and irreverent act of turning his back, sword in hand, on the scene he has just created, as if about to take his leave with a melancholic smile, to say hello then wave goodbye at the end of the act.
Colors are saturated, references overlap – fashion, theater, club culture, carnivalesque tradition, editorial imagery – and each image seems to carry with it a story that began elsewhere, continually entering and exiting the scene. This logic of overflow does not end within the exhibition space, but finds further extension in the gallery front window, conceived as an autonomous body and at the same time a reflection of the exhibition. Here, the image seems to definitively lose its two-dimensionality in order to recompose itself as a three-dimensional presence made of objects, masks, confetti, and scenic elements. The installation is built through accumulation and precarious balance, transforming the armory of Carnival into an unstable, almost recursive composition. In this sense, the window openly dialogues with the 2023 photograph Trova le differenze: if in the frame two almost identical images provoke an interrogative gaze, forced to search for the minimal difference, here it is space itself that functions as a device of comparison and variation. The exhibition reflects itself, repeats and distorts, as in a continuous mise en abyme: the board generates the images, the images become scenography, the scenography refers to another possible game. Even the undulating architecture of the installation, with its folds and niches, acts as an internal display window, an additional site of appearance. Everything works to keep the gaze in motion, called not to recognize, but to distinguish.
It is here, in this attitude, that the exhibition finds its balance: play remains at the center, visible and suspended, but the images move beyond it, amplifying it. The characters continue to move even outside the board and the window, as if the game were never truly confined to a single plane. In this continuous slippage between play and scene, between rule and image, between mask and presence, Alessandro Merlo’s practice reveals its deepest nature: not to represent a celebration, but to activate its conditions, making each photograph an act, an apparition, a performance that demands to be looked at.
MARE KARINA
Address: Campo de le Gate 3200, Venice 31022 (VE)
Opening times: Tuesday - Saturday, 10 AM–1 PM and 2–6 PM
Contacts: info@marekarina.com +39 329 258 0978