An Icon of Venice

In An Icon of Venice I imagine myself as a Canaletto brought back to life in 2025.
For me, living in Venice is like walking through the pages of a book made of wood, brick and marble, but it also means confronting, every day – in an increasingly totalizing way – tourism. From this arises in me a backward-looking reflection on a widespread, often unspoken unease: a true imaginative discomfort.
This work entirely reprises an eighteenth-century view of the Basin of San Marco. Within this visual code, however, I insert an unexpected and oxymoronic element: a twenty-first-century crane, just beyond the prisons near the Doge’s Palace. On it appears the banner “TAX THE RICH TO GIVE BACK TO THE PLANET,” a direct quotation of the protest that appeared on the crane opposite the Hotel Danieli on the occasion of Jeff Bezos’s wedding in Venice.
This detail introduces an effect of estrangement: the viewer, initially immersed in the pleasure of a “classical” view, realizes that something is off. For almost three centuries, Venice has appeared almost identical to itself: the clothing could be that of the contemporary Carnival, the rowing boats those of the Historical Regatta, and the presence of the crane may suggest that the scene belongs more to the twenty-first century than to the eighteenth.
It is no longer, then, simply Canaletto’s view: it is our vision of Venice, which does not differ all that much from the one the painter himself might have had. The city has changed little in its appearance, while its function has shifted towards a predominantly receptive and exhibition-oriented dimension, turning it into a place that lives off its own image.
Within this framework, Jeff Bezos’s wedding appears to me, in some respects, as an echo of the receptions held for rulers of the past, yet set in a city that struggles to redefine itself within modernity. Jeff Bezos is not merely a passing figure: his arrival, for me, concentrates and almost exhausts the ambitions and possibilities of the city.
The gold that composes the entire work introduces an iconic and almost transcendent dimension, fixing the image in a suspended time in which past, present and future overlap. Venice thus becomes the mirror of societies that struggle to imagine – and therefore to shape – their own future. The protest over Bezos’s arrival appears to me not only as an act of dissent, but also as an implicit declaration of impotence. The game takes place elsewhere; here we remain a toy that can only demand compensation for its use.
On the right, in the foreground, a barrel with my signature engraved on it translates this unease onto an individual level and highlights the underlying mechanism: it is from the sum of individual visions – including my own, I too being entangled in the city’s touristic vocation – that the overall vision of and on Venice takes shape.
The warning that surfaces from this “floating body” is that, carried by the current, it may land on any shore: on any view that fails to have a true vision of the future.

Dedicated to Francesca.