12 September| Via di città, 49 – Siena
OPENING Friday, 12th September, 2025, 6.00 PM
12th September – 19th October, 2025
“BEHIND THE CURTAIN | DIETRO IL SIPARIO”, solo exhibition by artist Thomas Riess.
Violetti Arte Contemporanea is pleased to present the solo exhibition by Thomas Riess, BEHIND THE CURTAIN | DIETRO IL SIPARIO, curated by Francesco Savini and Elena Violetti.
With a focus on the human being and their relationship with time and reality, Thomas Riess explores the contradictions of a world built within a multimedia dimension. His artistic practice—spanning mixed media, painting, and video—analyzes and visually reworks a seemingly perfect yet fundamentally artificial reality, which the artist deconstructs and reassembles into unsettling images, rich in ambiguity and critical reflection.
At the core of his work lies the human face, a subject that Riess fragments, transfigures, or dissolves, often starting from a photorealistic language only to subvert its codes. Through these visual ruptures, the artist shifts the viewer’s attention from the figure to the language of painting itself, emphasizing how every image—even the most realistic—is ultimately an illusion, a construction.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that “there is no beautiful surface without a terrible depth.” Thomas Riess’s work reflects precisely on this oscillation, within which contemporary humans drift like they’re at the mercy of waves—torn between a desire to appear (the only way—apparently—to inhabit the world) and the need to seek something deeper, lasting, and truly defining, rather than ephemeral. The “grand narratives” are far from over. The risk, instead, is to find ourselves stuck in a vicious cycle—an eternal present that no longer looks toward the future with purpose, but settles for fleeting satisfaction, illusory visibility, and short-lived moments of glory. Riess addresses the sense of alienation and anxiety this system fosters in the modern individual—not with resignation, but with the artistic spirit of awakening from dogmatic slumber, of reigniting critical thinking and the ability to envision a different future.
The relationship between surface and depth, between illusion, truth, and deception, has always stirred human reflection. The ancient Greeks understood this well: they loved illusion and revered the surface, which for them was anything but superficial. The surface of beauty, embodied in the Apollonian aesthetic, had known the tragic dimension of the Dionysian—the depth of the abyss, which, as the German philosopher reminds us, is first and foremost Abgrund: a lack of foundation. To be superficial was, therefore, a reflection of being profound—of having known the darkness of the abyss and emerging from it, able to endure its terror.
Thomas Riess thus reminds us that the essence of an authentic life does not lie in the frantic pursuit of appearance, nor in the fleetingness of the moment, but in reconnecting with those elements of the abyss that define us—and that constantly resurface through the surface.
The exhibition BEHIND THE CURTAIN presents a selection of works that explore some of the central themes of his research. These pieces, created for specific contexts, offer a glimpse into the artist’s complex production: from symbolic and surreal portraits to evocative landscapes rooted in personal memory, to time travelers—enigmatic figures from an uncertain future.
A key highlight of the exhibition is the video work I AM I AM NOT, presented at the Venice Biennale in 2013. Composed of 2,730 photographs, the piece reflects on the processes of transformation over time, blending images, personal memories, and layered visual materials. Alongside the video, the mixed media work that gave rise to the project is also displayed: a kind of “visual chronology, an open narrative” that fully embodies Riess’s poetics.
From this perspective, even the most abstract works resemble film fragments—blurred frames from a parallel reality, translated into painting. Each image thus becomes a threshold, a fleeting glimpse into the enchanted—and unsettling—world of the artist.
BEHIND THE CURTAIN raises pressing questions: How much of our reality is shaped by what is virtual, constructed, or illusory? In an era dominated by self-representation through social media—where performance often replaces identity—the faces Riess presents to us—distorted, silent, unrecognizable—force us to confront the instability of the self and the crisis of authenticity.
Thomas Riess’s protagonists navigate between what is and what appears, between experience and memory, between the predictable and the unpredictable. Deprived of a center, they are both fascinating and disturbing: visual metaphors of our vulnerability and the transience of existence.
