I Think I Made You Up Inside My Head
Thomas Brezing’s exhibition I Think I Made You Up Inside My Head confronts the viewer with a meditation on the fragile architecture of identity and memory. The architecture of Palazzo Provana di Collegno, a space where history, education, and ideology converge, becomes the ideal stage for an inquiry into the human face as both mask and mirror, portrait and vanitas. The building’s dual legacy as a theatre of power and education echoes the artist’s own inquiry into how the human face becomes a vessel for change, reflection, and impermanence.
These portraits rooted in the still life concept of being a representation of something still alive and not yet completely death, that in limbo state which Brezing’s paintings evoke the heightened tension of the fragile threshold between body and spirit. In the seventeenth century, artists such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini captured this suspended state in works like the ‘Ecstasy of Saint Teresa’, where divine rapture and human vulnerability intertwine. Many Baroque painters placed youthful figures beside flowers or fruits, symbols of fleeting beauty and inevitable decay, to reveal the transience of existence. Brezing’s layered, gestural heads carry that same charge: their luminosity and fragmentation evoke beings both alive and dissolving, poised on the edge of transformation.
A similar contradiction animates Caravaggio’s ‘Boy Bitten by a Lizard’, where sensual youth is pierced by sudden pain, a fleeting moment when vitality becomes aware of its own mortality. Brezing’s faces modernise this Baroque drama: emerging from darkness, marked by gestures of becoming and undoing, they embody the tension between life’s pulse and its dissolution.
At the same time, Brezing’s work resonates with the modern existentialism of Francis Bacon, whose screaming heads and distorted visages revealed the raw fragility of being. Like Bacon, Brezing understands the face as both presence and fracture; a surface where emotion, memory, and mortality converge. Yet his approach is more meditative than violent: through tactile layers and chromatic depth, he conjures images that oscillate between apparition and disappearance, beauty and erosion.
They recall the devotional intensity of Baroque altarpieces while speaking in the language of contemporary subjectivity. Each head becomes a psychological still life, a meditation on existence itself; neither portrait nor symbol, but an image suspended in flux.
Borrowing its title from Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’, I Think I Made You Up Inside My Head explores the boundary between imagination and reality, memory and invention. Brezing’s faces, at once intimate and universal, invite us into that fragile interval where the living image trembles between affirmation and erasure.
In dialogue with the palace’s layered past and the long history of art’s engagement with transience, Brezing’s paintings remind us that to depict life is always to glimpse its vanishing. As if echoing the poet’s words — “There’s a white canvas glowing like a lamp in the body, waiting patiently to be released and aroused and painted” — Brezing’s portraits seem to emerge from within, illuminated by the fragile light of consciousness, suspended between becoming and fading.
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L’Occhio Vede Ciò Che la Mente Conosce
L’Occhio Vede Ciò Che la Mente Conosce — the eye sees what the mind knows — is both statement and challenge. Martina O’Connor’s solo exhibition unfolds within the former classrooms of a high school once housed in the upper floor of Palazzo Provana di Collegno, a Baroque palace connects to the royal kingdom and the tragic events of the IIWW. This layered setting becomes a conceptual frame for the artist’s inquiry into perception, knowledge, and conditioning.
The Baroque was an era obsessed with spectacle and allegory, a period that gave rise in the history of art to two enduring visual paradigms: the Wunderkammer and the Vanitas. Both sought to reconcile human curiosity with existential awareness. The Wunderkammer, emerging in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, embodied the encyclopedic desire to order the world, cabinets of curiosities that assembled ‘naturalia’ and ‘artificialia’ into microcosms of universal knowledge. Yet beneath their meticulous taxonomies lingered mystery and wonder: the acknowledgement that the world exceeds any attempt to fully contain it.
In Martina’s installation, a niche becomes a contemporary Wunderkammer. Fragments, objects, and symbols are classified and aligned as if in a didactic tableau, but this order is unstable, verging on absurd. Meaning slips through repetition, exposing how educational systems, like cabinets of knowledge, are built as much on exclusion as inclusion. The viewer recognises the desire to comprehend, yet senses the impossibility of total understanding, a mirror to the contemporaneity and the inaccessibility to real informations.
Opposite, a Vanitas niche reinterprets the 17th-century memento mori tradition, reminding viewers of life’s brevity and the futility of possessions and learning before mortality. A crowned ram’s skull and a dried artichoke bloom embody the tension between splendour and decay, echoing the palace’s ornate surfaces and the transience they conceal. Within the context of a former classroom, this allegory acquires new force: no rule, no lesson, no inscription escapes the passage of time.
These two visual archetypes — Wunderkammer and Vanitas — form the intellectual axis of the exhibition. They speak of the human urge to classify, control, and comprehend, and of the inevitable dissolution of those efforts. Around them, Martina orchestrates a choreography of signs: huge canvases like Monkey See – Monkey Do! and No Words evoke the progression from imitation to indoctrination, while chalk hopscotches and suspended drawings trace the journey from innocence to awareness.
Installed within a classroom, the exhibition establishes a dialogue between past and present. The palace architecture, once a theatre of aristocratic display and later of institutional learning, becomes a fitting stage for a reflection on how vision is trained, how the ornate façades of knowledge and power conceal fragility, illusion, and mortality.
By invoking the Wunderkammer’s order and the Vanitas’s admonition, Martina transforms the classroom into a space of critical wonder; a contemporary cabinet not of curiosities but of consciousness, where perception itself is placed under examination. In this suspended realm between splendour and decay, instruction and imagination, the artist invites us to see anew: to recognise that the eye sees only what the mind has been taught to know.
Palazzo Provana, Turin, Italy
Dates: 23rd October – 6th November 2025
Opening Reception: 23rd October, 6pm
Location: Palazzo Provana di Collegno, Turin, Italy
Supported by and in partnership with
