Grilli is a collection of small inks drawings on marbled and woodcut-printed paper for bookbinding, handcrafted by several historic workshops in Venice. The exhibition is intended as a tribute to a city that is still alive, despite the progressive and increasingly massive takeover of space to the trade in imported junk, which represents a veritable erasure of the history and tradition of this place and these crafts, for which existence now means resistance.
The exhibition is also a tribute to books, a world of paper that forces us to pause and slow down. Even the images on display are presented more as reading material than as purely visual material: Fabio De Meo’s entire body of work can be understood as a large book to leaf through and lose oneself in, often senseless and divergent reading, made up of a multitude of images and iconographic, literary, and biographical references. Almost always, in the artist’s work, there is a noticeable lack of a unified image, as if the single image were unable to contain everything but always needed a following page, a further movement; mother images and endless offspring are what develop the artist’s work and continuously feed and move it.
The title of the exhibition refers to medieval “grilli,” engraved stones from the Roman era that often depicted bizarre symbols and figures. Once used as seals, they became coveted collector’s items during the Gothic period. These colorful stones were often used to decorate and embellish reliquaries and liturgical objects, including important covers for precious gospel books. The decorative or esoteric use and rediscovery of these objects had a great influence on the medieval imagination: strange profane figures were Christianized, becoming demons, evil spirits, or good omens that we find in miniatures or in the sculptural decorations of capitals and portals. Absurd beasts and deformed creatures began to populate the European imagination, reaching the dawn of the Renaissance and the work of Hieronymus Bosch.
The artist reworks and reconstructs these Gothic oddities, creating contemporary ‘grilli’ that transform small pieces of marbled paper into fragments of engraved gems, depicting ambiguous or obscene characters and absurd stories often linked to the city of Venice.
The exhibition also features a series of brochures: small thematic editions that tell stories through images using a visual language that ranges from comics to graphics, illustration, and satire. In addition, the video “I quattrocento scherzi del demonio” is screened, a series of animation fragments created between 2024 and 2025, by sequencing thousands of ink drawings made across numerous notebooks.