There is a quiet instability at the core of Francesco De Prezzo’s practice. His works rarely assert themselves as fixed objects; instead, they seem to hover, caught between appearance and withdrawal, between what is shown and what is withheld.

Across painting, photography, and sculpture, De Prezzo approaches the artwork as a site of tension, often activated through acts of removal, substitution, or erasure. Born in Lecce in 1994 and now based in Brescia, De Prezzo belongs to a generation of artists for whom the image is no longer a stable endpoint, but a shifting condition.

His work consistently probes the limits of representation, focusing on how images are constructed, framed, and ultimately perceived. Rather than producing definitive forms, he creates situations in which the artwork resists resolution, remaining open, contingent, and quietly unsettled.

A key element of his practice is the documentary gesture. Yet for De Prezzo, documentation does not function as a neutral record of an exhibition; it becomes a primary medium in itself. Installation views appear suspended in time, as if capturing a moment just before something is installed or just after it has been removed. This temporal ambiguity produces a subtle but persistent dislocation, where the viewer is left to question not only what they are seeing, but when they are seeing it.

This sensitivity to misalignment, between image and function, object and context, runs throughout his work. Surfaces appear intact yet slightly estranged; objects suggest use but resist it. These minimal deviations operate almost imperceptibly, yet they destabilize the viewer’s expectations, introducing a form of perceptual hesitation that unfolds over time.

Within the exhibition space, this approach becomes even more pronounced. In dialogue with a lineage that includes Michael Asher and Louise Lawler, De Prezzo examines how artworks are mediated through display and institutional framing. However, rather than directly exposing these structures, he employs a quieter strategy of displacement. Works appear isolated, misaligned, or absent altogether, creating an environment that feels suspended between installation and deinstallation.

This condition places the viewer in a state of uncertainty. The exhibition is no longer a fixed, coherent whole, but something provisional, an image in flux. In this sense, De Prezzo’s work resonates with Rosalind Krauss’s notion of the “expanded field,” where the boundaries between object, space, and image dissolve. Yet his approach is marked less by expansion than by reduction, by an insistence on withholding, on creating space through subtraction.

What ultimately defines De Prezzo’s practice is this sense of latency. The artwork is never fully resolved; it exists in a continuous state of becoming and undoing. Meaning does not arrive fully formed, but emerges gradually, shaped by the viewer’s attention and the conditions of display.

In an image-saturated culture that often privileges immediacy and clarity, De Prezzo offers a more measured proposition. His work invites a slower, more attentive mode of looking—one that lingers in ambiguity and resists closure. Here, what is absent is not a lack, but an active presence: a space in which perception itself is brought into focus, and where the boundaries of the artwork remain deliberately, and productively, unresolved.