Giulio Segato
As part of the 2026 La Punta della Lingua poetry festival at the Mole Vanvitelliana in Ancona, the exhibition “Super Pignotti” (27 June – 7 July 2026) cast a spotlight on Lamberto Pignotti, a leading figure of the Italian neoavanguardia and a pivotal presence in international visual poetry. The exhibition showed eighty years of the poet’s research, offering the public the work of an author who turned the intersection of word and image into one of the most fertile situations for artistic experimentation in the second half of the twentieth century.
The exhibition collected together 33 works shown in chronological order from his early surrealist-tinged drawings of the late 1940s to the Iper-rebus (Hyper-rebuses) of the 2000s. What emerged was a trajectory at once coherent and mutable, able of crossing seasons, idioms, and mediums without ever losing its critical core: questioning the codes of communication and dismantling the mechanisms of visual persuasion.
The exhibition opened with three youthful drawings showing the influence of the historical avant-gardes, particularly Surrealism and Dadaism. Though they are early works, they are already oriented towards that experimental tension that, in the following years, would lead Pignotti to develop a practice grounded in the dynamic relationship between writing, imagery, and a critique of contemporary society.
The core of the exhibition itinerary was dedicated to the 1960s, a decisive era for the artist. In this context. Pignotti, together with Eugenio Miccini, Lucia Marcucci, and other key figures of the Florentine scene, contributed to the birth of Gruppo 70 a pivotal movement for the development of so-called technological poetry or visual poetry. In the verbo-visual collages of this period, advertising slogans, newspaper headlines, and glossy images are stolen from their original contexts and unsettlingly recombined almost always with an ironic subtext. The result is a semantic short-circuit that compels the viewers to disrupt their passive enjoyment of the message and to become aware of its hidden mechanisms.
Here, one of the central aspects of Pignotti’s work comes to light: irony. Not a mere light-hearted tone or a rhetorical device, but a critical stance, a way of inhabiting language without succumbing to it. In his work, irony acts as an antidote to any dogmatic reading and any claim to definitive meaning. It dismantles messages, cracks them open, and exposes them in their ambiguity. In this sense, Pignotti’s work never asks the viewer for passive reception: rather, it asks the viewer for questioning what and how he is seeing.
A second crucial juncture concerns the artist’s personal definition of poetic language. Very early, Pignotti questioned the notion that poetry must stay inner a lofty lexicon or a separate syntax. For him, poetic quality does not reside in words per sé but in the purpose and effect of the artistic operation. This shift allows poetry to open up to the idioms of modernity: newspapers, advertisements, comic strips, slogans, and photographs. Thus, poetry is not impoverished by the contact with the codes of the present and rather it finds a new possibility for critical existence within that contamination.
While at first glance some works may seem to echo American Pop Art, the direction pursued by Pignotti and Gruppo 70 appears distinct, and far more political and polemical. In Pignotti’s visual poetry, the goal is not to celebrate or iconize the imagery of consumerism, but to problematize and fracture it from within. The word, rendered as image, is thus transformed into an instrument of critical resistance capable of challenging the language of mass communication.
Another important transition in the exhibition regarded the evolution of Pignotti’s work between the second half of the 1970s and the subsequent decades. While the logic of accumulation and stratification (of newspaper clippings, photographs, etc.) prevailed in his earlier works, in this phase the artist proceeds instead by subtraction. In the DeComposizioni (DeCompositions) and the Visibile/Invisibile (Visible/Invisible) series, images and surfaces are abraded, erased, hollowed out, and crossed by marks and interventions introducing ambiguity, irony, and fade-outs. It is a methodological shift that marks the transition from the “full” to the “empty” yet it does not break the continuity of his reflection: the form changes but the drive to reveal what the visible tends to conceal remains intact.
The path closed with works from the 1990s and 2000s confirming the enduring relevance of a practice that continues speaking to the present. In an era dominated by the overproduction of images, the manipulation of messages, and the blurring of the boundary between the real and the constructed, Pignotti’s work proves surprisingly close to the core issues of our time.
“Super Pignotti” was undoubtedly a celebratory exhibition for the poet, Pignotti has just turned 100, but it was also an opportunity to re-evaluate an author who anticipated many of the questions now at the center of cultural debate. At the Mole Vanvitelliana, the exhibition restored the power of a language that continues to interrogate the gaze and to demand, once again, that we do not consume images in a distracted and passive manner.