CLAUDIO PARMIGGIANI – A journey into the art of absence

As soon as I crossed the entrance of the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London, on a clear June morning, I perceived silence that seemed to go beyond the usual museum hush. It was dense silence, charged with invisible presences. Thus began my immersion into the poetic and unsettling universe of Claudio Parmiggiani, one of the most influential figures in contemporary Italian art and the focus of the first institutional exhibition in the United Kingdom.

A Disciple of Giorgio Morandi, Parmiggiani draws from him an ethical rather than stylistic inspiration, and stands out for using a language that transcends the individual experience to evoke a universal truth.

The retrospective — organised by the Consulate General of Italy in London in collaboration with the artist’s Archive and Tornabuoni Art Gallery — will remain open until August 31 and offers an intense journey through more than fifty years of artistic exploration. But it is around Displacements, the beating heart of the exhibition, that my experience takes shape.

Displacements are more than works of art: they are apparitions, ghosts left behind by fleeing matter. Since the 1970s, Parmiggiani has used smoke, soot, and dust to “burn” objects into the wall — bottles, books, human figures — leaving only their imprint, their absence. The object disappears but its trace remains, suspended in time, like a relic of memory.

I find myself in front of a wall where the evanescent silhouettes of a bookshelf emerge. The books are gone, yet they still seem to speak. My gaze glides over the darkened shapes, as if trying to read the stories contained in those now-vanished volumes. It’s a disarming sensation: what I see no longer exists, yet it continues to weigh on the space — like a memory that refuses to be forgotten.

*Claudio Parmiggiani at the Estorick Collection (2025)*

As I walk through the galleries, I encounter more intimate and monumental versions of these works: a series of images depicting hands, faces, crosses. There is no religious rhetoric, only deep spirituality. Each of these pieces is mute invocation, suspended uneasiness. This art doesn’t represent but rather evokes. Every trace burned into the wall is a wound and, at the same time, a testimony: something was here, lived here, and is now lost.

The emotional impact is heightened by the presence of works on paper and sculptures Parmiggiani calls “painted sculptures”: plaster casts — of a fragile and dense material, often stark white — that take on form and weight only to allude again to absence. Here too, it is not the material itself that dominates, but its tension toward the invisible.

The exhibition, part of the celebrations for Italy’s Republic Day, offers a rare opportunity to approach an artist who has always rejected the ephemeral and the decorative. Parmiggiani does not seek the viewer’s gaze — he questions it. And he leaves it suspended in a timeless dimension, where emptiness becomes fullness, and silence speaks.

Visiting this retrospective is like walking through an ancient cathedral built from the shadow of matter. Parmiggiani’s works remind us that every presence is already, in itself, a form of absence — and that true art does not show, but questions; it does not declare, but makes space. In this sense, Parmiggiani is not merely a visual artist, but a philosopher of the visible, a sculptor of the invisible.

As I leave the Estorick Collection, I feel as if I were carrying something with me — something unseen, yet heavy. Like fine dust, Parmiggiani’s absent images have settled inside me. Displacements do not tell stories, but leave questions behind: about the permanence of things, the value of traces, and our need to find meaning even in emptiness.

In an age where images are everywhere — and often meaningless — Parmiggiani performs the opposite gesture: he empties space to fill it with meaning. His artworks do not ask to be understood, but to be experienced. They are pauses, suspensions, invitations to silence.

While walking through Canonbury Square, in the heart of a noisy and vibrant London, I realise something has changed in my gaze. It’s as if every object, every shadow, could now reveal its own fragility — and its own aching beauty.

In the cover: Claudio Parmiggiani, Lights Out (1985)
Images courtesy of the Estorick Collection