Listening with Eyes, Watching with Ears
Carmela De Falco. Sat 6 Jun 2026 to Sun 19 Jul 2026
by Vitto Giusti
There is a particular kind of attention this exhibition demands, not the alert, forward-leaning attention of someone waiting to be told something, but the quieter, more uncertain attention of someone who has just realised the message may never arrive.
Italian artist Carmela De Falco’s solo debut at DES BAINS Gallery this June 2026 and unfolds as a triptych of thresholds: the interior body, the passage between spaces, and the world outside. Each work occupies a station along this journey, and together they trace what remains of communication once its certainty has dissolved.
The exhibition begins, quite literally, with the body, or rather, with its refusal to look. Looking presents two small casts of closed eyelids, taken from the artist’s mother, mounted directly onto the white gallery wall. The forms are startlingly intimate: smooth, pale, almost camouflaged against the wall, easy to walk past without noticing. Where a traditional mask cuts away the eyes to allow sight and project presence outward, these do the opposite. They seal. The eye is present but withheld; vision is implied and then denied. What does it mean to witness something with your eyes shut? The work suggests that certain kinds of knowing happen inward, in the dark, and that blindness is not always absence. Sometimes it is a form of protection, or of memory.
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- The artist (left), and visitors
From the interior, De Falco moves us into the threshold. Signal, a chain of Roman tintinnabula suspended from ceiling to floor, hangs at the centre of the light-flooded space. These ancient bells were once instruments of passage: they rang to mark arrivals, ward off evil, punctuate time. Here, they are silent. And yet their silence does not empty them of meaning. If anything, it concentrates it. The bells still look like bells. The gesture of announcement is still legible in their form. Their muteness makes that gap between function and operation visible in a way that sound never could. We are left expecting a ring that doesn’t come.
Then the exhibition steps outside. The eyes are lured low on the floor in the corner of the gallery, a small screen plays footage of a performance in a public square: a singer repeating a fragment of The Beatles’ I Me Mine, again and again, until the phrase begins to loosen from its original meaning. The lyric, insistent, possessive, familiar, gradually becomes rhythm, then almost pure sound, stripped of its original context. The square absorbs it. Passers-by move through. Nothing changes, and then something does.
The triptych holds together with quiet precision. De Falco is not interested in rupture or spectacle. She works instead at the level of the almost-imperceptible shift, the moment a sign begins to drift from what it once guaranteed. In doing so, she asks something fundamental: what do we rely on to hold the world in place? And what happens in the interval, between signal and destination, between closed eyes and open ones, when that hold begins to loosen?
Leaving the gallery, you may find yourself more aware of the weight of ordinary things, a doorbell, a glance, a half-remembered song, and quietly unsure whether they still mean what you thought they did. Next exhibition in Naples-Italy at Fondazione Morra Greco.
