FOUNDATION – ART & OBJECTS

Dries Van Noten Makes Beauty an Act of Protest in Venice

The Belgian designer’s new foundation opens at Palazzo Pisani Moretta with an exhibition devoted to craftsmanship, contradiction and the difficult pursuit of beauty

At the Fondazione Dries Van Noten, beauty does not arrive politely. The first object encountered within Venice’s Palazzo Pisani Moretta is Peter Buggenhout’s The Blind Leading the Blind, a looming mass of salvaged metal and accumulated dust. Against the palace’s gilding, stucco and Rococo refinement, its brutality feels almost confrontational—a warning that the exhibition ahead will not treat beauty as mere decoration

Titled The Only True Protest Is Beauty, the foundation’s inaugural presentation marks Dries Van Noten’s next chapter following his departure from his eponymous fashion house in 2024. The phrase comes from American activist and songwriter Phil Ochs, though Van Noten omitted its opening words, “In such ugly times.” The implication remains present throughout: beauty here is not an escape from the world, but a considered response to it

That idea began at the entrance. In the darkened ground-floor rooms, Neolithic sandstone statue-menhir figures stood on plinths of earth, their ancient forms carrying the directness of objects made for forces older than art history. Nearby, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Versus Medici from 1982 introduced a radically different speed. Basquiat’s marks appear almost seized before thought can domesticate them, giving the painting an urgency that belongs equally to the street, the unconscious and the studio

Looking back, the strength of the installation was its refusal to make these pairings feel merely clever. The prehistoric figures and Basquiat were not placed together as a visual trick. They shared an intensity of transmission: both seemed to have been made from the need to externalise something before it disappeared

Elsewhere, the exhibition turned towards the instability of the self. Kurt Ralske and Giulio D’Alessio’s audiovisual installation Tristis est anima mea presented a spectral figure appearing and dissolving to the sound of medieval music. The work suggested a body released from ordinary time, passing between memory, image and projection. Within the Fortuny rooms, intuition became less a private impulse than a way of encountering something outside the limits of the self

Renato Leotta’s photographic series Tempo (Memoria e Materia) offered a more elemental register. By immersing photosensitive paper in the Mediterranean and exposing it to moonlight, Leotta allowed the sea and lunar light to participate in the making of the image. The artist did not withdraw entirely, but he accepted a diminished authority. He created the conditions, then allowed nature to leave the mark

One of the exhibition’s most exact architectural moments arrived in a white room with Anish Kapoor’s White Dark VIII. Projecting from the wall with ambiguous depth, the work appeared at once flat and spatial, object and void. Its soft contours resisted comprehension, holding the eye in a state of uncertainty. Nearby, a religious statuette of Saint Anne teaching the Virgin Mary shifted the question of intuition towards transmission, suggesting knowledge received through presence, touch and devotion rather than argument

Marina Abramović’s commissioned work, Standing Structure for Human Use, made that transmission physical. Visitors stood opposite one another with their foreheads touching large rose quartz crystals, entering a shared act of concentration. Whether approached as belief, scepticism or theatre, the work understood something central to the exhibition: intuition often depends on the desire to receive, not simply the will to know

What remains important about Intuition is how completely Palazzo Fortuny shaped the experience. The building was never a passive container. Its dense interiors, former life as Mariano Fortuny’s studio and atmosphere of textile, theatre, shadow and invention gave the exhibition a charge that a neutral museum space could not have supplied. Vervoordt and Ferretti used the palazzo as an active participant, allowing its rooms to hold the works in suspense

In retrospect, Intuition stands as one of Vervoordt’s most persuasive Venice exhibitions because it did not treat art as evidence arranged around a thesis. It trusted proximity, silence and atmosphere. Prehistoric sculpture, Basquiat, Kapoor, Abramović and Leotta were gathered not to explain intuition, but to demonstrate its operation. At Palazzo Fortuny, art was allowed to reach the viewer before the mind could decide what it had understood