Introduction

Parnassus, in tradition, is the place of knowledge and creation. In this project, it does not coincide with a mythological origin, but with a structure: a system through which images take shape and become visible. Giorgio Tentolini’s work develops around a process of emergence. Through the layering of metal mesh, the image never asserts itself as immediate evidence, but gradually surfaces. The face is constructed through stratification, as if emerging from a preexisting weave.

The mesh is the central device of this research. It is both concrete material and model: it recalls biological systems, neural connections, technological infrastructures, but also human relationships, memory, and time. It does not separate, but connects. It does not define, but allows to emerge. Within this system, two fundamental series coexist. Pagan Poetry originates from classical Greek-Roman and Neoclassical sculpture, reflecting the historical construction of the image of the body. Eídōlon, on the other hand, introduces figures generated through artificial intelligence: plausible faces without origin, constructed from data networks.

Between these two dimensions there is no opposition, but continuity. In both cases, the image is the result of a process: selection, construction, transmission. The exhibition unfolds within the Prince’s Apartments of the Reggia di Colorno, a space historically conceived as a place of representation and order. The rooms, with their decorative and symbolic apparatus, do not act as a simple container, but enter into dialogue with the works, reinforcing and amplifying the themes addressed.

Within the Reggia is also located ALMA – The International School of Italian Cuisine, an institution that bases its approach on innovation and on the transmission of knowledge through practice. In this context, cuisine itself becomes a system of knowledge, where technique, culture, and experimentation intertwine. The presence of ALMA introduces an additional level of interpretation: that of knowledge built through doing, through concrete and transformative processes. The project is structured as a system that can be traversed in both directions. Experience, knowledge, innovation, action, intervention, transformation, and meaning are not sequential phases, but conditions that redefine themselves depending on the point of observation.

Within this context emerges the dialogue with GSK (Glaxo- SmithKline), a reality engaged in scientific research and in the transformation of knowledge into care. Its areas of intervention — prevention, vaccines, immunology, targeted oncology, HIV, and advanced biomedical research — develop as a complex system, where knowledge is not isolated, but distributed within a network of relationships among data, technologies, and expertise. As in the artworks, contemporary research no longer considers the body as an isolated entity, but as an interconnected system, traversed by processes that determine its functioning, its vulnerability, and its possibilities of transformation. To traverse Parnassus means to enter this system. Not to follow a linear narrative, but to move within a network, where each image is both origin and consequence, and every passage can be reinterpreted in light of the others.