Fontanarossa gives the title to the exhibition and translates to “Red Fountain,” evoking the visceral image of magma erupting from Mount Etna, the active volcano on the eastern coast of Sicily. This blood-red lava spills from its source and courses down the mountainside toward the island’s quiet towns and cities, both beautiful and terrifying in its intensity. It is a symbol of desire and destruction, an image of virile sexuality erupting from the earth’s core.

At the centre of the exhibition, acting as a centrifugal force, is a sculpture bearing the same name. Three headless horses spin in a chaotic vortex, pierced through their torsos by a metal pole — a direct reference to the traditional parading of Saintly sculptures in the streets of Sicily. The horses, hand-carved in wood, echo the physicality of Catholic saints like San Sebastiano, a symbol of pious suffering, yet long adopted as a gay icon. These horses, however, stand in erotic defiance. Headless, they surrender reason to carnal impulse. Their muscular bodies, arched backs, tight waists, and limp hooves exaggerate queer desire — camp, grotesque, and strangely divine.

They are both glorified and objectified: a public display of agony, shown like trophies in a theatre of pain, mirroring the Catholic processions where suffering is sanctified. In traditional votive carts, such sculptures were often fully hand-carved in wood, decorated and adorned with obsessive attention to detail. The labour behind their making was itself an act of devotion. This is a key element in Fontanarossa — where the artist uses traditional materials and techniques to speak not just of suffering and spectacle, but also of bodily devotion, craftsmanship, and identity.

The material is not neutral; it is the carrier of meaning. Wood becomes flesh. Work becomes worship. These are sculptures where the physical labour — carving, sanding, staining — is not hidden but exalted. They are offerings of time, energy, and intimacy. All elements are reactive, alive, carrying memory and tension. The sculptures are not static objects but active bodies — bearing scars, desire, weight.

In contrast, the steel structures in the exhibition bring a colder, industrial presence. In The Disappearance of a House, a geometric “home” is corroded by human waste — urine — as a metaphor for defilement, resistance, and reclamation. The house becomes a battleground between the so-called "House of God" and the queer body trapped within it — a body swollen by the repression of its own truth.

Like Pinocchio, perhaps the most famous Italian tale after the Bible, the person wants to be “real,” yet cannot help but stand out. The nose protruding through the house becomes a symbol of ambiguity: is it a nose, a phallic organ, a glory hole, or a sign of shame? The queer experience is reduced to its sexuality, and that is all the world sees: the protrusion, the part that sticks out. The house rusts and decays, not as a moment of liberation, nor as an act of sin, but as an unavoidable consequence of having to live one truth while buried inside another.

There is a fundamental ambivalence in the work. On one side, there is a reverence for tradition, for Catholic ritual, for the intimacy of craft. On the other, there is resentment — toward the repression, the shame, and the superficiality of modern queer relationships, often fleeting and disconnected. Pione doesn’t tell us where he stands — or even if he knows. Are we looking at the front or the back? Is this devotion or desecration?

This inner contradiction is the true eruption of Fontanarossa: a hot, heavy, hurting flow that burns through Sicilian soil, through the body, through faith — always alive, always unresolved. 

Photo documentation by Ben Deakin