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The Invented Reality, Daniel González

Exhibiting from November 2025 through May 2026, at Gallery Hotel Art

Curated by Valentina Ciarallo

Lungarno Collection continues its dialogue with contemporary creativity by welcoming Argentine artist Daniel González for his first exhibition in the city.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1963, Daniel González lives and works between New York and Verona. His artistic research revolves around the ritual of celebration, understood as a collective phenomenon capable of subverting social order and productive rationality. He has participated in numerous exhibitions, biennials, and international projects; in 2019 he represented Haiti at the XXII Triennale di Milano, and his work is held in major art institutions worldwide. Among his most significant accolades is the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2017).  In 2025 he presents Golden Gate, a site-specific installation at the Monumental Cemetery of Bergamo for Contemporary Locus 17, and I Love You, a solo exhibition at Visionnaire Wunderkammer in Milan. In 2018 he took part in Manifesta 12 in Palermo with Mi Casa Tu Casa. For years, González has explored the tension between the ephemeral and the structured, pushing his research beyond two-dimensionality to include architectural installations and site-specific projects.

This project transforms the hotel into a space of reflection and lightness: it opens on November 27, 2025, a date intentionally chosen to coincide with Thanksgiving. This symbolic timing becomes an invitation to pause, gather, and celebrate gratitude. Here, art serves as a medium to share joy, appreciation, and beauty, turning the exhibition into a small collective ritual of celebration and wonder.  At the heart of the project is a series of new works made of mylar, a reflective, iridescent material associated with festive imagery—balloons, celebrations, and carnival as a moment of joy.
Across the shimmering surfaces, words and phrases such as “I Love You”, “Thank You”, “It’s Ok”, “Open Mind”, “Hot Stuff”, and “Nice” emerge like daily-life graffiti. Through these messages, González transforms emotion into visual gesture, restoring to language its original power of connection and shared experience. Each word becomes an affectionate declaration, a fleeting thought that reflects and multiplies, inviting viewers to recognize themselves within a universal vocabulary worth preserving. In the glitter of mylar, our emotions are mirrored—our need to communicate, to reassure, to thank, to love—celebrating the expressive energy of words themselves.

“My work is centered on the ritual of celebration,” the artist explains, “understood as a collective practice, a moment in which everyday life is suspended to give space to encounter, lightness, and festivity.”

This idea of festivity—understood in its anthropological and philosophical sense—becomes for González a universal language that connects people beyond roles and differences. The vibrancy of the materials points to the possibility of a direct and positive communication, a symbolic place where the public is invited to question their own codes of behavior and to let themselves be permeated by openness and joy.  As the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote, “the festival is the presentation of the community itself in its most complete form.” In this spirit, González’s “text paintings” act as catalysts of collective energy: words that vibrate, reflect light and the surrounding environment, shifting and recomposing with the movement of air. They offer viewers the sensation of entering a suspended moment in time, where even the smallest gesture can become a form of celebration. González’s works embody the idea of relational art—not merely objects for contemplation but shared experiential spaces capable of generating connections among viewers, who become active participants in the work. The exhibition also features a series of glittering monochromes, small, embroidered tapestries, and a selection of handcrafted “Flowerpots”, vases created using an original sequin-embroidery technique. These works pay homage to the artist’s Tuscan roots: as a child, González was fascinated by the food tins, commercial packaging, and detergent boxes that his grandmother reused as plant containers.

The iconic imagery printed on those containers—from sun-kissed tomato harvesters to pop characters like “Mr. Clean”—took on an almost mythical aura for him, becoming “super-powerful images” to reinterpret through his own visual language.

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