Please take this seriously
Exhibiting from June 10, 2026 at Gallery Hotel Art
Curated by Valentina Ciarallo
Lungarno Collection once again embraces and celebrates art with a new project that enriches its collection of collaborations. Since 2000, the Gallery Hotel Art at Vicolo dell’Oro 5 has fostered a creative dialogue between contemporary art, the people of Florence, and the hotel’s international guests.
Please Take This Seriously presents itself as an invitation, yet it operates as a paradox. The moment the invitation is accepted, it begins to break. The more seriously one attempts to engage with it, the more impractical it becomes. This subtle tension between intention and failure is the basis for the entire research of Daniele Sigalot, Roman by birth but Berlin by adoption. Today his studio is located in Rome’s Gazometro and is called “La Pizzeria”: a meeting place and a hub for action, open to creative events and collaborations. It is also the birthplace of the renowned “Coppa Pizzeria,” an irreverent international tournament that blends football and performance art. Over the years, the project has developed a visual universe capable of unsettling certainties and challenging conventions, turning irony into a sharp critical tool.
Born in Rome in 1976, Daniele Sigalot is an Italian artist known for his conceptual installations, ironic visual language, and use of industrial materials. At the core of his practice is the tension between the apparent nature of materials and their actual identity, using contrast as a tool to challenge perception and generate meaning. After living and working for many years between Barcelona, London, and Berlin, he returned to Italy, establishing his studio—ironically named La Pizzeria—first in Naples and now in Rome's Gazometro district. Conceived as both a studio and a gathering place, La Pizzeria hosts creative projects, performances, and collaborations, including the renowned Coppa Pizzeria, an irreverent international football tournament that has evolved into a large-scale collective performance. Sigalot's work has been exhibited in major institutions and public spaces including the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome, Milan Malpensa Airport, the Royal Palace of Caserta, MOAD in Miami, the Doge's Palace in Genoa, Triennale Milano, the Royal Palace of Naples, and the Uffizi Galleries in Florence.
The Florentine exhibition presents a selection of works created specifically for Gallery Hotel Art, bringing together the distinctive elements of his practice — from the iconic lacquered aluminium post-its to the original and site-specific The Ping Pong Paradox, as well as a reimagined installation of polished steel airplanes with iridescent tips. Common daily and familiar objects are transported into an unexpected dimension, where lightness intertwines with a sharp reflection on the art system and the dynamics that shape it.
The brightly coloured post-its are presented in a variety of sizes, from maxi to micro, all maintaining the classic square shape — even the smallest pieces, which recall the original notes typically used for quick thoughts, temporary reminders, and messages destined to disappear within the flow of daily life. Sigalot, however, subverts their ephemeral nature and, through the use of a cold and durable material such as aluminium, grants them a permanent quality. What was originally conceived as a support for private annotations becomes instead a surface for a shared message, preserving the immediacy of the gesture and the spontaneity of thought while completely overturning its original function. The entire exhibition project is built upon a play of illusions and displacements in which appearance and reality, seriousness and lightness, meaning and nonsense coexist without ever fully resolving themselves. Sigalot constructs a visual language grounded in ambiguity and duality, capable of placing the viewer in a condition of estrangement suspended between amusement and reflection. Within this unstable balance, irony becomes a strategy of survival — a form of critical resistance against a reality that increasingly tends to spectacularise and simplify everything, including art itself.
Please Take This Seriously should therefore be understood as a conscious deception: a title that challenges the audience, inviting them not to resolve the paradox, but to inhabit it.
