Paris – Nicolas Ballario, recently named among The Art Newspaper Italy’s 100 most influential figures in the art world, will guide audiences tonight, November 4, at the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris, through the story and poetics of Maurizio Cattelan — one of Italy’s most celebrated and provocative contemporary artists.
The evening focuses on three of Cattelan’s most irreverent and unsettling works, each challenging the boundaries between art and society through biting irony and striking imagery. Choreographer Lara Guidetti, together with CCN/Aterballetto dancers Alessia Giacomelli and Kiran Gezels, translates Cattelan’s subversive spirit into movement, turning irony, paradox, and the unsaid into physical gesture.
This unique dialogue between dance and contemporary art, Visioni del Corpo. Maurizio Cattelan for the Italian Cultural Institute of Paris, is part of Italia Danza, a co-production by the Directorate General for Public and Cultural Diplomacy and CCN/Aterballetto.
The choreography does not simply recreate Cattelan’s works but lets itself be inhabited by their hidden tensions. Each artwork—chosen and handed over to the dancers by Ballario—becomes a spark of irony and tragedy, giving the body its material. Dance, here, does not narrate or describe; it evokes and suggests, generating fleeting visions that embody both fragility and vitality.
The result is a daring encounter between the body and the image: an artistic game where perception itself is at stake, moving constantly between truth and illusion, laughter and discomfort—just like life.