“We cannot consider ourselves without relation to others,” said Edmund Husserl, who considered “being in relation” as a constitutive condition of human beings, overcoming all forms of subjectivism and objectivism.
Subjective consciousness is always “consciousness of...”, of others and of the world. “We are connected to a shared surrounding world,” explained Husserl, “we are part of a personal community: the two things go together”

(Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy.  Book II, 1952).

These fundamental concepts of phenomenology form the basis of modern philosophy and highlight that the human condition cannot be separated from relationships. How do we experience this relationship?

This is the question behind the works exhibited by Caterina Pini and Saverio Feligini, a rare complementary artistic duo that has grown stronger over the years through constant interaction in the same studio and the creation of both individual and joint works.

Pini considers the relationship with the other in an intimate existential dimension. Feligini focuses on the “personal community” in the “common surrounding world” of today's metropolises.
Two perspectives on the relationship with the other, united by profound reflection.

“ CHECK POINT ” : contemporary urban landscapes - Saverio Feligini

Visions of contemporary metropolises suck us into the vortex of the reflective windows of their endless skyscrapers; the heavy concrete of large buildings engulf us until we disappear. Beneath dark glasses, a thousand invisible eyes stare at us and digital eyeballs follow us constantly like George Orwell's “Big Brother,” squeezing us in a vice that takes our breath away and leaves us naked. Human beings are seen, but they do not see. As in De Chirico's metaphysical landscapes, the city is suspended and inanimate.

Saverio Feligini constructs his collages with admirable meticulousness and compositional taste, selecting his cutouts from glossy magazines using a free but rigorous method. He arranges his figures on various wooden supports, treated and covered with light paper, so as to have a solid base on which to slide them into a game of combinations and overlaps that changes day after day, until he finds the right balance. Only then, after countless shifts and reconfigurations, does she move on to the final stage of gluing. It is a long, delicate, subtle task; an artistic process that goes hand in hand with intuition and leaves room for introspective reflection on life in today's metropolises. The composition is perfectly balanced, empty and full spaces are in their place, weights and supports compensate each other, forces are balanced according to criteria reminiscent of the Ideal Cities of the Renaissance. However, these places are not studies, but imaginary representations of the conscious experience of contemporary man living in today's immense metropolises: cold, overwhelming, violent.

Where there is excessive expansion and the “human scale” is lost, man is also lost. Buildings whirl around a center until they shatter at the edges due to centrifugal force. It is difficult to imagine building relationships in oversized spaces that control and crush us. The sense of community that makes a city a polis, with its own distinct identity, has vanished in the immeasurable vastness of our metropolises, where souls wander warily, locked into their forced routines. Must we then return to nature to rediscover our human dimension? To reestablish a relationship with ourselves and with others? We know full well that this is not possible. We can never go back.

These visions of metropolises that absorb us in the vertigo of their black hole seem, on the one hand, to exclude the human. On the other hand, to quote Friedrich Nietzsche, they maintain the compositional harmony of “Human, All Too Human” and tend toward their own original perfection, showing that the two poles are not only tragically forced to coexist, but also know how to “live together” .

“ I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE A SILENT EVENING ” - Caterina Pini

Caterina Pini is a multifaceted artist who surprises with the variety of her subjects and her ability to range from drawing to painting to sculpture, using a wide variety of materials and techniques. Her works defy categorization due to their “inconsistency” and the coexistence of multiple styles. Pini produces a great deal, then cuts, erases, and discards until her research leads to an idea that she decides to develop.

This exhibition is based on a selection of previous works that are added to a new series. Long imagined, it aims to tell a story. For this reason, the artist has combined the works with written notes that accompany the observer during the visit.

Relationships with others are as inevitable as they are difficult. It is hard to understand and be understood; the temptation is to give up, but we cannot. Hence the need to stop and, as far as possible, reverse our perspective, which often traps us, and finally manage to talk to those in front of us.

This is what we see in “Messa in scena” (Staging): a small sculpture of colored clay, scratched by a few marks that make it lifelike and vaguely resemble two faceless human figures who seem to be asking each other questions without getting any answers. The communicative gap between the two is rendered by the artist in photographs of the sculptural body from different angles and under ever-changing light, as if to suggest that an encounter can be found. The difficulty in communication can be resolved by recognizing in the other, by analogy, our “alter ego” with our own needs and difficulties, whose vision we can accept without judgment, even in its complexity.

Another viable means of communication is traced in “Thirteen Envelopes.” White envelopes with dark, deep throats, torn open by nervous fingers; concealing words that are impossible to pronounce because they are too often shouted; however, they reach the recipient in the form of letters, thus reworked: the ink and the writing make them less harsh and more reasoned, offering those who read them the chance to understand them. It is a symbolic work, which unites the two opposite poles of the experience of consciousness that struggles between incommunicability and the real possibility of authentic communication.

A third evocative path is that of “Radar,” which transports us into a dreamlike vision of technology so advanced that it allows us to pick up the frequencies of others' feelings and tune into them so that we vibrate in unison, in perfect harmony. Ultimately, this is Pini's dream: if, in a hyper-connected age, we experience the paradox of extreme difficulty in understanding each other, why not imagine a science-fiction technological “medium” that comes to our rescue?

Caterina Majocchi - art critic and counselor - Open Studio by Caterina Pini and Saverio Feligini, Rome, RAW 2025.