ALEXEI IZMAYLOV, ANDREA FERRERO, DAMARIS ATHENE, DAVIDE LA MONTAGNA, FEDERICA DI PIETRANTONIO, NICO CRISANTI, SALVATORE PIONE.
From Thursday, September 24 to Sunday, November 1, FRENCH PLACE is proud to present ENMERKAR’S RIDDLES, a group exhibition featuring works by Alexei Izmaylov, Andrea Ferrero, Damaris Athene, Davide La Montagna, Federica Di Pietrantonio, Nico Crisanti, and Salvatore Pione.
The exhibition embraces riddles, play, and laughter as epistemological practices: ways of exposing the contingency of certainty and opening dominant narratives to continual reinterpretation. Language emerges as a site of mediation, interpretation, and rewriting, capable both of reinforcing systems of power and of opening spaces of freedom.
The title draws from Roberto Calasso’s The Tablet of Destinies, where King Enmerkar challenges the ruler of Aratta through riddles etched onto clay tablets, creating what Calasso describes as the first form of writing.
Why riddles? In ancient mythology, they are never merely puzzles to be solved, but performative acts embedded in structures of power. They test intelligence, authority, and legitimacy, turning language into a site of negotiation. For Calasso, writing is thus born not from the need to record information, but from a struggle over meaning itself, where military confrontation is displaced into symbolic exchange. The riddle makes this displacement possible precisely because it operates as a form of play: it establishes rules, stages a challenge, and turns confrontation into an act of interpretation. This connection between play, language, and performance is embedded in the English verb to play itself, which encompasses both the ludic act and theatrical performance, collapsing distinctions between fiction and reality, rehearsal and action.
In Homo Ludens (1938), Johan Huizinga understands play as a founding condition of culture. Far from opposing seriousness, it structures the production of meaning itself, becoming a space where language and power are negotiated, identities performed, and narratives rewritten. This potential extends to laughter, which The same potential can be found in laughter. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin, Paula Findlen approaches laughter as an epistemological tool: a way of unsettling hierarchy and exposing the instability of what appears certain. Over the course of the centuries, many philosophers and thinkers have used laughter, irony, and comic dialogue to articulate truths that challenged established structures of power: they have been adopting laughter as a philosophical stance, exposing the contingency of certainty and opening reality to reinterpretation.
Within this framework, the artists in the show work across different media to examine how collective truths and personal histories are continuously written, revisited, and contested. Central to their practices is an approach of repurposing and rewriting, using language and storytelling to unpack inherited narratives, expose the structures of power and social dynamics they sustain, and ultimately hack them from within. In doing so, the exhibition shows that meaning is never fixed, but can be continually negotiated, performed, contested, and rewritten.
THE ARTISTS
Alexei Izmaylov ping-pongs between image-making and sculpture, combining original studio objects with procured industrial elements in a propositional ecosystem shaped by play, power, consumption and queer desire. His work is a tool for examining structures that shape contemporary experience, permeated by a subtle and highly erudite irony that confronts the viewer and challenges a passive position.
In PURSUIT Izmaylov reflects on digital forms of surveillance and control, tracing the circulation of likes, collective resignation and the tension generated by constant online exposure.
The combined works in GLOW UP PETER PAN echo J.M.Barrie’s story of Peter Pan and use bootleg badges bearing phrases from queer magazines to explore alternative systems and resistance to fixity itself: a state in which play, identity and meaning never have to harden into permanent form.
If Izmaylov mobilises play to question the structures through which we perceive the world, Andrea Ferrero turns to the images through which we learn and internalise those structures. Her practice investigates how representations of power become woven into our collective imagination. Architectures and symbols associated with conquest and authority—castles, equestrian statues, church ornamentation, and armour—are instilled in us from childhood, through playgrounds and Disney stories. How can we expect to grow up free if such images are embedded in our imagination from the cradle?
Salvatore Pione turns to inherited symbols of power transmitted through popular mythology and everyday forms of devotion. His sculptural reinterpretations of symbols, figures, and creatures from Sicilian folklore explore the enduring role of faith, where devotion is expressed through gestures, objects, offerings, and acts of hope. Coins and other humble materials become carriers of desire and belief. Working with wood and steel through labour-intensive processes of carving, oxidation, and patination, Pione evokes the material culture and weathered architecture of his native Sicily. Rooted in memory and local traditions, his sculptures bring together the sacred and the vernacular, the grotesque and the poetic, giving material form to narratives sustained by collective imagination.
Language, understood as code and software architecture, lies at the core of Federica Di Pietrantonio’s practice. Working across painting, programming, video, and photography, she explores how virtual environments and videogames shape identity, community, and new forms of world-building. She adopts modding and digital preservation to translate digital ruins into material images, revealing both the fragility and the generative potential of contemporary media.
return null is an installation that explores the possibility of a shared language between hardware and the human body transforming functional operations into empathetic and/or anesthetic sonic experiences. the edge of collapse explores eye contact between the observer and avatars from marginal online communities, challenging the boundary between physical reality and virtuality. Drawing on testimonies gathered from niche and disappearing online spaces, the series transforms collective memories into portraits of digital communities, revoiced through AI. The works reflect on belonging, identity, and the fragile nature of online spaces, where archives, communities, and shared histories can disappear.
The possibility of rewriting established frameworks also runs through Davide La Montagna’s practice, which seeks alternative modes of inhabiting and narrating experience that bypass dominant structures. Working across installation, performance, writing, sculpture, video, and drawing, he uses poetic language to explore love as an ambivalent force shaped by desire, intimacy, and power. In Angel Spare Change, milk and honey, symbols of nourishment and care, are juxtaposed with their use as instruments of torture in the practice of scaphism, while his collages conceal images of his parents’ wedding, transforming personal memory into a space of imagination and empathy. Set between domestic intimacy and darker narratives of violence and control, his work leaves the boundaries between love and violence, care and harm, presence and absence deliberately unresolved.
Damaris Athene moves toward the point where language itself becomes insufficient. Her practice draws on feminist posthuman theory to question the boundaries between humans and more-than-humans and to explore how digital technologies reshape perceptions of bodily materiality. In __deepcopy, she physically distorts photographic images through sheer fabric, reflective surfaces, and mirror glass, transforming landscapes into unstable, fragmented visions that blur the distinction between photograph and painting, reality and abstraction. By bringing processes of digital manipulation into the physical world, Athene questions photography’s claim to truth and asks what remains of an image once it has passed through multiple layers of mediation.
At this threshold between language and embodied experience, Nico Crisanti turns to the body, gesture, and matter. His practice centres on figurative painting as a field of physical and psychological presence rather than representation. Faces, gestures, and gazes emerge through a process that leaves the traces of its own making visible: spolvero, thick brushstrokes, abrasions, incisions, and chromatic layers rising from raw, unprimed canvas. Crisanti’s paintings inhabit a fragile space between stillness and movement, control and collapse, revealing the precarious nature of contemporary existence.