Marco Tirelli. Light Years

 

The exhibition, curated by Mario Codognato, unfolds across Rooms 9, 10, 11, and 12 of Palazzo Esposizioni, presenting itself as a single, expansive pictorial cycle conceived for this occasion. Each work, while retaining its own autonomy, is woven into an organic and continuous fabric—a true “ideal ribbon” traversing the exhibition space. The rooms become a theater of memory, where painting functions as a mental space before it is visual, a place where reality dissolves to become visible. 
Here, Marco Tirelli constructs a cosmogonic representation of his practice, an atlas of presences and absences that encompasses his entire poetic universe, intertwining visual memories, fragments of cinema, literature, art history, and shadows of inner visions. 

The exhibition pivots on two fundamental axes of Tirelli’s research: the drive to map the world through a symbolic and mnemonic language, and the constant interplay of light and darkness, where shadow becomes substance and a threshold between the visible and the unseen. 
Light, understood as both generative principle and instrument of revelation, creates space, gives form to the formless, and lends consistency to thought. In this sense, every image emerges from the real yet tends to become something other; every form is an apparition, and painting is configured as an unstable equilibrium between recognizability and abstraction, a journey in which perceptual experience becomes inner experience. 

The forty-one large-scale works on display, all of the same height, form a visual continuum: a score of emergences and dissolutions, reflections and memories, where each figure resonates as an echo of the past, a fragment of collective memory, and a threshold toward the invisible. Through this complex visual language, Tirelli transforms painting into a device that renders visible what does not yet have form, constructing a space where light separates and shadow becomes substance, where the image exists simultaneously as presence and disappearance. 

In this perspective, the exhibition does not merely present artworks, but invites visitors to experience painting as a place of continuous metamorphosis, where seeing and thinking coincide, and where each work is both autonomous and part of an evolving whole. The viewer traverses a path in which perception becomes memory, the visible encounters the invisible, and painting reveals itself not as representation, but as the very manifestation of the possibility of seeing and thought. 

 

 

Information
Palazzo Esposizioni Rome
Via Nazionale 194, Rome
www.palazzoesposizioniroma.it
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Title: Marco Tirelli. Light Years
Curated by: Mario Codognato
Period: March 17 – July 12, 2026
Promoted by: Department of Culture of Roma Capitale and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo
Produced and organized by: Azienda Speciale Palaexpo
With the support of: Fondazione Silvano Toti
Catalogue: Electa
Media sponsor: Dimensione Suono Soft
Technical sponsor: CoopCulture
Special thanks to: Krumiri, Petrolo 

Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday 10:00 – 20:00, Monday closed. Entry permitted until one hour before closing.
Tickets: Full €15 – Reduced (19–26 years & over 65) €12 – Youth (7–18 years) €7 – Free for children under 6. Tickets valid for all ongoing exhibitions. First Wednesday of the month: free entry for under 30 (from 14:00 until closing). 

Accessibility: Palazzo Esposizioni Rome is accessible to people with reduced mobility or sensory abilities through three barrier-free entrances.