We would like to draw your attention to the opening on Wednesday 16 September 2026 of Il Regno della Quantità e i Segni dei Tempi [The Realm of Quantity and the Signs of the Times], a group exhibition featuring works by Nanni Balestrini, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Gianluigi Colin, Kings and Pino Pascali, organised by Metronom (Modena) to coincide with the Festivalfilosofia Caos.
The exhibition’s title alludes to the essay by René Guénon, the French writer and philosopher whose thinking constructs and forms a relentless critique of the modern world – that West which is "the point where the sun sets" – revealing its dynamics and demonstrating how they lead to spiritual and cosmic decline. The categories of linear time and historical time, unity and simplicity, but in particular quantity and quality, where quantity – the measurable, replicable data – has supplanted the qualitative dimension of existence.
Through their works, the selected artists navigate the ‘realm of quantity’, fragmenting and dissolving it; they are perfect interpreters of their time, spanning a historical arc from the second half of the twentieth century to the 2000s. The art they practise is not confined to a closed, self-referential sphere, but is deeply intertwined with human activity: a creative chaos experienced and formalised in ways that are only apparently distinct – abstraction and the exploration of the visual word.
It is not easy to piece things together, Nanni Balestrini tells us in one of his Cronogrammi, because language is never innocent, nor are words, nor is the act of breaking up and reassembling sentences – in a process that may only appear arbitrary. Art or non-art? Pino Pascali plays the game of life and art like a tightrope walker, balancing the quest for the new with the risk of falling; the Alfabeti are an attempt to make sense of an ambiguous complexity and the non-violent weapon that he himself creates and makes available. If it is history that constructs the relationship between the past and the present, as John Berger tells us, Gianluigi Colin chooses to narrate the present by interpreting its chaos – a chaos that shifts levels of interpretation and meaning between images and words – entrusting to paper, a malleable, fragile and, in this context, no less symbolic material, the role of guardian of the image, preserved over time and from the ravages of time.
Images that proliferate in the works of the Kings collective – through juxtaposition, accumulation and plays on scale – construct modern black-and-white frescoes that captivate with the grace of their composition, only later revealing the detail of the collage, unity and simplicity. For Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, this simplicity leads to the – apparent – dissolution of the image, an eternal "centrifugal force" that crushes humankind with a "monstrous wave", elevating nature to the status of the divine.
Il regno della quantità e i segni dei tempi [The Realm of Quantity and the Signs of the Times]
16 September ‒ 28 November 2026
METRONOM, via Carteria 10, Modena
Opening hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday 9.30 am–1.00 pm / 2.00–6.30 pm, Saturday 2.00–6.00 pm
www.metronom.it