What We Fail to See in Rothko

What makes a work of art a work of art?

Its technique? What it makes me feel? The price it reaches at auction? The number of people who pretend to have understood it?

While translating Péricles Gasparini’s book Cornici Alternative, Arte o Ribellione? into Italian, I found myself forced to ask these very questions. In the introduction, Gasparini wondered not only about the value of his own creations, but also what transforms an object into a work of art, and a work of art into something worth preserving. How much of that value belongs to the artist, and how much, instead, to the gaze that recognizes it?

These are questions I carried with me, and they echoed with surprising force in front of Mark Rothko’s monumental, imposing, almost unsettling canvases.

The artist, one might say, is born to be misunderstood, and there is no real argument against it. The best art is the kind that makes you doubt yourself, isn’t it?

I tend to think the most “worthy” art is the one that produces a kind of vertigo in the stomach. A wonder that feels like disorientation.

So when I arrived at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, I was mentally prepared to be unbalanced by it all: anything, really, as long as I did not remain indifferent.

Spoiler: in front of those vast fields of yellow, red, and shadow, I may have expected to feel more.

But perhaps, as certain women with compromised self-esteem like to say, “the problem is me.”

And yet Rothko would likely have appreciated this reaction. In fact, he might have distrusted its opposite.

Because Mark Rothko did not want his paintings to be merely admired. He had little interest in someone thinking “beautiful colors” before moving on to the next room. He wanted something far more uncomfortable: a confrontation.

Walking through the works gathered at Palazzo Strozzi - the exhibition open until August 23, 2026, bringing together more than seventy pieces from some of the world’s most important museums, from the MoMA and the Metropolitan in New York to the Tate in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, tracing virtually the entirety of Rothko’s artistic trajectory from his early figurative work to the great fields of color that made him famous - I had the clearest realization that the true subject of his paintings is not color, but the viewer.

Rothko was born in Latvia as Marcus Rothkowitz and emigrated to the United States as a child. Over the course of his life, he lived through wars, migration, economic crises, and vast cultural upheavals. And yet, instead of painting the external world, he gradually stripped his canvases of almost everything: people, landscapes, objects, stories. What remained, in the end, was only color, light, and silence.

A slightly mad decision, if one thinks about it. As if a novelist had removed the plot just to see whether the reader would still stay.

In 1950, Rothko visited Florence with his wife Mell and was deeply moved by the frescoes of Fra Angelico at the Museum of San Marco, as well as by the vestibule of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library. Palazzo Strozzi has structured part of the exhibition around this unexpected dialogue, extending it into the very spaces of the city that marked him so profoundly.

But what struck me most was not the mystical reading of Rothko so often repeated.

It was the mockery, the slap. I imagine it aimed especially at the elite dining rooms of the Four Seasons in New York. Not so much because his works were rejected, but because he himself withdrew them before they could become the backdrop to a thousand-dollar dinner. A gesture I find elegantly vindictive, infinitely more punk than most contemporary provocations.

I felt it in his canvases: the brazen transgression of a surface painted with almost religious care. As if to say, go on: see what you make of all this darkness.

As if to say: if you see nothing, perhaps it is you who are empty.

Perhaps this is also why Rothko continues to divide audiences. His work offers no handholds, tells no story, suggests nothing about what you are supposed to feel.

It leaves you alone in a room with yourself and a yellow rectangle as large as a wall.

And for many of us, that is already an extreme enough experience.

—

Bianca curates and writes for The Olive Press, a space for reflections on cinema, culture, and landscape born within Il Giardino di Cristina.

Tim Burton at the XV Florence Biennale: anatomy of an enchantment

October 21, 2025, proved to be a day worth remembering. It began rainy, gloomy, perfectly aligned with a spectral mood. Predictably, I woke up far too early and then, just as predictably, fell back asleep. When the alarm finally fulfilled its duty and click - my brain processed that I might actually meet (if I hurried) one of my all-time favorite directors.

So, with whatever scraps of energy I still possessed (admittedly not abundant that morning), I headed toward Florence with my number-one partner in crime: my mother. A small detail you should know about her is that she approaches anything I suggest with a level of enthusiasm that is approximately twice mine. Even if said “anything” involved a wait that turned out to be six hours… on our feet. Minor occupational hazards. The occupation being “film-obsessed woman,” perhaps.

At the entrance of the XV Florence Biennale, inside the imposing Fortezza da Basso - once a military structure, now saturated with contemporary art - the atmosphere mirrored the theme of this year’s edition: “The Sublime Essence of Light and Darkness. Concepts of Dualism and Unity in Contemporary Art and Design.”

The exhibition brought together more than 550 artists from over 80 countries, with roughly 1,500 works on display, running from October 18 to 26, 2025. That afternoon, at 5:00 p.m., the ceremony for the prestigious Lorenzo il Magnifico Lifetime Achievement Award took place, honoring artists who have deeply shaped the contemporary landscape.

The official announcement stated that the curatorial committee wished to recognize Tim Burton for “his extraordinary artistic work across drawing, graphic design, stop-motion animation, and filmmaking.”

Yet the event offered far more than a ceremony. A short walk from the award hall, the Fortezza hosted another small theater of wonders: the exhibition Tim Burton: Light and Darkness. The title alone felt like a polite spoiler for the occasion. The organizers designed a path resembling a treasure hunt through Burton’s mind: sketches, notes, little creatures seemingly sprung from a tender nightmare and, most charmingly, drawings pulled directly from his notebooks.

The show unfolds over several rooms, each thrusting you into a different fragment of his imagination. It begins with two-dimensional works that are anything but flat: paper pieces, 3D lenticulars, and resin creatures that appear just one breath away from life. The lighting was surgical, precise. Shadows slipped in only where needed to let unease emerge.

Then the atmosphere shifted. I found myself in a room that felt like a psychedelic amusement park: ultraviolet lights, colors that scratch at your pupils, and at the center a spellbound carousel. A secret “Burtonland,” familiar even though none of us had ever been there.

Finally, the cinephile gut-punch: puppets and concept art from his films. Victor and Emily from Corpse Bride reminding you that love after death can be far more loyal than love among the living. Edward Scissorhands appearing in the form of a sketch, as if whispering: “Relax, I never quite fit in either.” Little totems returning to the audience the most intimate side of stop-motion.

I realized that the exhibition’s thesis was disarmingly simple: nothing is ever only light or only shadow. The works said it. The curator said it. My half-lit face said it while I tried to decide whether the fluorescent monster in the corner was waving at me. Burton never asks the viewer to pick a side. He invites you to look at the very line where contrasts make peace.

I couldn’t help noticing how the entire setting - from the morning rain to the dark foyer - served as a perfect stage for his world. Anyone who has seen Edward Scissorhands or The Nightmare Before Christmas even once knows that Burton orchestrates light and darkness so that beauty frequently emerges from the in-between.

While I was standing in line (still on my feet, with my mother gesturing like she was commanding an army of ghosts), I thought about how right the Biennale was in choosing this theme. Dualism of light and shadow isn’t just a concept in Burton’s work. It is its heartbeat. And Florence was not just a backdrop. It was a silent character.

The ceremony itself lasted just a few minutes. The director walked onstage, delivered a brief thank-you in Italian that could use just the slightest polishing, and the room erupted in applause that refused to end. I mentally recorded it as “a heart still beating even in the dark.”

During those two minutes, I imagined that Tim was looking at me. Yes, I know: delusional. Yet in that sliver of time, I felt the sheer disbelief of being there, witnessing the encounter between one of my creative lodestars and the city hosting him.

When we finally stepped out of the Fortezza at dusk, the rain had given up. Streetlights flickered. Headlights glimmered in the distance. The thin, whispering light of Florence seemed to secure a temporary victory over the darkness, glinting on the wet stones with the grace of a small urban spell.

Burton would have approved.

—

Bianca curates and writes for The Olive Press, a space for reflections on cinema, culture, and landscape born within Il Giardino di Cristina.

Cousins, missed stops, and transgenerational memory: the irresistible chaos of A Real Pain

I’m drawn to films that speak of solitude, distracted lives, complicated characters, and difficult truths. When they manage to do so with a light touch, I’m always in.

A Real Pain confronts precisely these existential themes, and it does so with that off-kilter grace of people who discuss profound emotions while pretending not to. Written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg - who also stars in the film - the movie nudges us to reflect on a few emotionally complex questions. Genealogy, for instance: who said it’s always a happy thing? Spoiler: it almost never is.

Discovering where your grandmother lived can turn out to be less epic than imagined, and more… disappointing. At least, that’s the case for Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David (Jesse Eisenberg), two polar-opposite cousins who embark on a road trip across Poland to honor their late grandmother. The mission is simple: pay homage to their roots. Reality, as it often does, proves far more convoluted.

Benji is a volcano undecided about whether to erupt; David is the one who keeps emotions in neat folders, as if managing an inbox. Watching them interact is like observing a stretched elastic: two extremes simultaneously attracting and repelling, oscillating between sarcasm and affection, irritation and complicity. On this emotional pilgrimage, one inevitably recognizes fragments of similar dynamics in past relationships: chaos versus composure, laughter masking pain, patience tested to its limits.

Between guided tours, hotels that scream “sad carpets and fluorescent lights,” and a series of awkward yet tenderly dysfunctional moments of cohabitation, the film builds an invisible dialogue between the two protagonists. Their bond is revealed not through declarations, but through gestures, silences, and clipped quips… because some affections are never spoken aloud; they leak through, like smoke from a poorly closed window.

And then we reach the unspoken question, the one we might prefer not to ask: how much right do we have to be happy? And if, despite every right and possibility, we simply can’t achieve it?

David is the settled man, married with children, one who followed the instructions to the letter. Benji is the loose cannon, the man who’s stumbled through addiction, depression, and pain - and can laugh about it. Happiness, both in this film and in real life, is capricious, often absent, and always hard to grasp. It doesn’t reward merit or emotional resume, prompting us to ask how transgenerational memory shapes it: what does it mean to be the grandchild of survivors, and how do subsequent lives inherit - or sometimes reject - that past?

Kieran Culkin’s extraordinary, heartfelt portrayal of the adorably flawed Benji earned him the Oscar for Best Actor at this year’s 97th Academy Awards.

Eisenberg, in crafting the script, has spoken of drawing from personal and familial experiences, particularly regarding Jewish memory and sibling bonds. A carefully executed experiment, the film was celebrated at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, winning the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award in the U.S. Dramatic section. At the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), it earned two awards: Best Supporting Actor for Culkin and Best Original Screenplay for Eisenberg.

As a director, Eisenberg opts for a lightness that doesn’t dilute the gravity of his themes but rather deepens them. He presents Poland not as a postcard but as a living site of memory - full of edges, silences, and histories that defy neat categorization. The visit to a concentration camp is not treated as a rhetorical climax: it is a pause of stark reality, unadorned by music or commentary, in a sequence that lingers in quiet, inescapable resonance.

A Real Pain is a compact film - 90 minutes of surgical precision - yet dense with emotional fissures, uneven rhythms, and well-measured humor. It does not seek catharsis; it eludes it gracefully. Instead of a conventional happy ending, it leaves an aftertaste: a bittersweet sensation that clings like a stubborn memory, refusing to fade once the credits roll.

The film does not aim to heal. Rather, it invites us to dwell in that uncomfortable space where memory meets irony, where laughter does not erase pain but renders it bearable. To exist is not easy, and certain mental entanglements are the privilege of the fortunate. And because - let’s admit it - not every journey has a destination. Some end where they began: within ourselves, with the sharp, punctual realization that life, with all its complications, is indeed… a real pain.

—

Bianca curates and writes for The Olive Press, a space for reflections on cinema, culture, and landscape born within Il Giardino di Cristina.

—

All images featured in this article are the property of their respective copyright holders. They are used here for informational and editorial purposes only, in the context of cultural commentary and non-commercial promotion. No copyright infringement is intended.