IT

Jack O’Brien’s first solo show in Italy – held at Ordet in Milan – led visitors through industrialized landscapes, ruins, and architectural traces of a bygone Renaissance, in the wake of suspended potentialities and the physicality of materials.

On 20 November 2025, Ordet in Milan hosted the closing of A Formality, the first solo exhibition in Italy by Jack O’Brien (London, 1993), whose practice is grounded in an extensive overwriting of meanings. Various materials – often sourced from consumer culture – are assembled and stripped of context to generate new narratives. Heat-shrink film, epoxy resins, fabrics, cable ties, and plastics come together in the large-scale installations with which O’Brien experiments. These works amplify the monumentality of his gestures of assembly, carried out both during and after the making process. Ordet became the stage for a story shaped by a desire to experiment.

A FORMALITY: THE CURATORSHIP

The curatorial project presents itself as an unfinished tool, made of gears and rollers that evoke a factory in the making, suspended in time. As you enter, a sharp smell reminiscent of glues and machine plastics fills the air. Both alluring and slightly unsettling, the scent sparks curiosity. Two intersecting black conveyor belts stretch diagonally across the space, creating a narrative punctuated by white objects – like small statues resting on plinths. Yet the mechanism is broken; nothing moves, and the process comes to a halt. The white – of the walls and of the sculptures – recalls a past sense of sacredness, emphasized by draped fabrics soaked in plaster and cement. The object is static, yet always in flux. Black, in contrast, brings us back to a performative present, to a consumerist society driven by productivity and perpetual motion. The transformation of the industrial object turns the exhibition experience into a moment of contemplation and reflection, far from the relentless efficiency of today. What the artist creates is not a finished object; it is an embodiment of possibilities, a gesture toward times that feel ancient, without slipping into didacticism. Reaching the second floor, one encounters a composition of pipes and drapery recalling columns with soft, fluid forms. The curatorial choice to exhibit the sculptures as though they were part of an assembly line reinforces the artist’s poetics. The reconfiguration of the object becomes increasingly urgent. The exhibition implicitly brings these aspects to the surface, making us participants in an infinite mechanism of which we become part, almost without noticing.

ORDET AND LENZ PRESS

Founded in 2019 by Edoardo Bonaspetti and Stefano Cernuschi, Ordet is not only an exhibition space but also an experimental laboratory and cultural hub. Following its relocation in February 2025, exhibitions now unfold within a 250-square-meter open space. The former garage, renovated by Ballabio & Bava, is now ready to host new approaches to display and installation. Its white-cube features make it an ideal terrain for exploring previously uncharted artistic possibilities. Located on Via Filippino Lippi 4, Ordet is connected to the first bookshop of the publishing house Lenz Press – founded by Bonaspetti – which offers catalogues, monographs, theory books, and artists’ publications on contemporary art, photography, architecture, and design. This creates a synergy between two entities that, since 2019, have pursued a constantly evolving project driven by experimentation and contemporaneity.

Maddalena Domenghini 

Ordet in Milan