On Thursday 14 May 2026, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere presents ULTRA FLAT, a solo exhibition by Alberto Maggini curated by Gianlorenzo Chiaraluce. The exhibition will be open to the public from Friday 15 May to Friday 10 July 2026.
Alberto Maggini’s artistic research explores the processes through which the mind selects, retains, and disperses information, images, and signs. By staging beauty rituals, the artist constructs ambivalent representations in which the boundaries between true and false, nature and artifice, the precious and the ordinary, the artwork and the everyday object grow increasingly tenuous, to the point of near dissolution. It is at this threshold—between the desirable and the undesired, between value and rejection—that his practice takes shape.
At the heart of ULTRA FLAT— conceived as a parody of a beauty salon — is the relationship between beauty and power, aesthetics and norms. Far from being a natural or universal value, beauty is presented here as a layered cultural construct, shaped by symbolic, technical, and economic systems that define standards, models, and desires far more complex than their innocuous and primitive simplicity might initially suggest.
Between aesthetic rituals, parodies of wellness, and the contemporary mythology of the ego, ULTRA FLAT constructs an experience that is only superficially ironic, inviting visitors to question what normally appears entirely innocent and desirable: the seemingly genuine promise of becoming more aligned with one’s own idea of themself. Beneath the veneer of self-care, the exhibition asks a far less reassuring question: how much labour, history, and ideology are required to produce something we simply call ‘beauty’?
