Act 3/3: Nello Spazio (Within Space) — A Captivating Finale to the Bigaignon x rhinoceros Trilogy in Rome

Rome’s contemporary art landscape starts 2026 with a compelling exploration of perception, materiality, and spatial transformation. The exhibition Act 3/3: Nello Spazio (Within Space) marks the final chapter of the ambitious Bigaignon x rhinoceros trilogy, presented inside the atmospheric Palazzo rhinoceros by the visionary Alessia Caruso Fendi. Running from 18 January to 15 March 2026, this culminating exhibition focuses on space—the deepest and most expansive of photography’s fundamental elements.

The trilogy began by examining light and time, but this closing act engages with the very architecture that underpins all visual experience. Space becomes not only the container of images but the active material from which they emerge. In a city such as Rome, defined by layers of history, ruins, and reconstruction, this theme resonates with particular force. The exhibition borrows from the stratified energy of the surrounding urban landscape, encouraging visitors to consider space as both a physical reality and a site of projection, memory, and imagination.

Rather than treating space as a neutral or passive setting, the works on view activate it in unexpected ways. Photography is expanded into sculpture, installation, and spatial intervention, revealing how images can inhabit the voids between surfaces, reclaim volumes, and disrupt established perspectives. Across the exhibition, space is stretched, folded, compressed, and reimagined, challenging viewers to navigate environments where the real and the constructed blend seamlessly.

This conceptual richness is supported by a diverse group of artists whose practices span architecture, archaeology, landscape, and perceptual experimentation. Their works include everything from plaster‑veiled photographs that evoke the suspended time of Pompeii to reconstructed Antarctic landscapes that blend archival history with contemporary abstraction. Throughout the galleries of Palazzo rhinoceros, digital and analogue processes intermingle, producing hybrid environments where fiction and reality co‑exist. Urban forms dissolve into sculptural photographs, imaginary architectures rise and fall between ruin and construction, and geometric interventions expand beyond the traditional boundaries of the frame.

The exhibition also reflects on how space can be destabilised. Several works actively unsettle viewers, disrupting familiar spatial cues and challenging assumptions about depth, scale, and orientation. These disorienting elements remind us that spatial perception is not fixed, but malleable; a fragile construction constantly reshaped by light, shadow, and perspective.

Historical work plays a part too, offering grounding within a show otherwise devoted to transformation. Installations and drawings from the 1970s reveal how the manipulation of light and material can turn space into an ever‑changing perceptual experience. Their presence underscores a long lineage of artists who have sought to push photography beyond its surface, questioning how images inhabit architectural environments.

Amid this breadth of approaches, quieter moments offer a sense of intimacy. Some works reduce space to its simplest, most contemplative forms, echoing the stillness of Giorgio Morandi or the meditative experience of studying familiar objects anew. In contrast, other contributions, such as monumental visions of Venice rendered in sweeping graphic abstraction, demonstrate how entire cities can be reinterpreted through rhythmic lines, sculptural silhouettes, and stripped‑back geometries.

While Act 3/3: Nello Spazio stands powerfully on its own, it is also complemented by Bigaignon’s ongoing installation by Olivier Ratsi on the first floor of the palazzo. This immersive environment unites the trilogy’s three foundational themes: light, time, and space, creating a resonant echo of the collaborative residency that has unfolded over the past year. Together, the exhibition and installation offer a holistic experience that moves visitors through conceptual, sensory, and physical dimensions.

At a cultural moment dominated by rapidly circulating, flat digital images across screens, the exhibition proposes an important counter‑experience: one that insists on slowness, physicality, and presence. Act 3/3: Nello Spazio invites visitors not merely to view images but to inhabit them; to consider how photographic practices shape spatial understanding, and how the spaces we occupy shape our perception of the world.

All photography: ©Simon d'Exea

With its blend of contemporary photography, sculptural installation, historical resonance, and architectural experimentation, this final act of the Bigaignon x rhinoceros trilogy stands as one of Rome’s most compelling exhibitions of early 2026. It offers a reminder that space is never just a backdrop; it is the very condition through which we experience art, memory, and reality itself.

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