Subvertising: la pubblicità che si ribella. A Venezia la prima mostra in Italia dedicata all’”Arte Sovversiva”

At the Itinerarte Gallery in Venice, coinciding with the 2025 Art Biennale, the exhibition "Subverthecity – Design to Distract" opens – the first show in Italy entirely dedicated to subvertising. The spotlight is on Padua-based artist Jacopo Dotti, in dialogue with Maestro Marco Strano. A unique opportunity to reflect, disrupt, and awaken perception through art.

VENICE – In an age where visual communication has colonized every aspect of daily life, there is an art form that doesn’t just question images—it overturns them, deconstructs them, transforms them into weapons of social critique: it’s called subvertising.

Starting June 14, 2025, within the refined setting of the Itinerarte Gallery—owned by Countess Novella Papafava dei Carraresi—the first solo exhibition in Italy entirely dedicated to subvertising will open, featuring the work of Padua-based artist Jacopo Dotti. The initiative, under the artistic direction of Fabio Facchinetti and in collaboration with Revolux Studios, coincides with the opening of the Venice Art Biennale, marking a compelling synergy between institutional art and alternative visions.

Subvertising: Design to Distract

Born from the fusion of subvert and advertising, subvertising is an activist art movement that appropriates the language of advertising to subvert its meaning. Billboards, posters, slogans, and logos are decoded, altered, sabotaged—not to sell, but to awaken. It's a form of communication that “destroys to rebuild,” striking at the core of cultural and material consumption.

This is the context in which "Subverthecity – Design to Distract" was born: the first solo exhibition in Italy entirely focused on subvertising, by artist Jacopo Dotti. Running from June 14, 2025, at the Itinerarte Gallery in Venice, in the Dorsoduro district just steps from the Biennale pavilions, the show is curated by art manager Fabio Facchinetti.

Subvertising: Art That Disrupts to Awaken

Subvertising is art born of resistance. Using the very tools of advertising—catchy graphics, slogans, billboard-style visuals—but reversing their messages, subvertising breaks the implicit pact between image and consumption, challenging the passivity of the viewer.

Jacopo Dotti, one of the pioneers of this language in Italy, presents a body of new works—posters, urban collages, and manipulated billboards—inviting the public to decode what mass communication tries to conceal.

“Subvertising,” says Dotti, “is like a visual virus that infiltrates the networks of dominant messaging. It doesn’t deny the system—it diverts, exaggerates, and unmasks it.”

The Art of Sabotaging the Visible

Through posters, collages, and urban installations, Jacopo Dotti’s works align with the traditions of guerrilla art and critical visual culture: manipulated brands, reversed slogans, reworked advertisements designed to expose what usually hides beneath the surface of promotion and persuasion. His work doesn’t merely “denounce”—it demands active participation from the viewer: to decode, to recognize, to resist.

“Subvertising,” the artist explains, “is an urgent form of language that uses the system’s own weapons to dismantle it. It’s not just about provocation—it’s about offering a possible alternative to the dominant narrative.”

The exhibition will also feature documentation of urban interventions and reflections on the power of commercial imagery in shaping collective identity.

The Figurative and Distorted Face of Modernity

Marco Strano: Painting as an Excavation into Silence

Sharing the exhibition space is Marco Strano, a multifaceted and charismatic figure: saxophonist, son of an artist, internationally renowned set designer, and art history professor, known for his distinctive and radical pictorial language. His distorted figurative paintings, suspended between gesture and dissolution, draw from a visceral expressionism that contemplates existential unrest.

His poetic vision emerges through carefully constructed voids and balances, where each face is distorted to the edge of recognition, in a near-psychedelic decomposition between abstraction and symbolism. His figures silently portray the fracture between appearance and reality, between public identity and inner emptiness.

His most recent series, inspired by the decay of the 1950s American “Happy Family” ideal, critiques the spectacle-driven society where the dream turns into a nightmare. The central theme—“The American Dream is Falling”—is both an aesthetic and political statement.

His work—filled with fragmented bodies, saturated colors, and unsettling atmospheres—is unified by this claim, a stark warning about a social model collapsing under the weight of its contradictions and systemic hypocrisies.

An Event of Art, Performance, and Social Critique

The exhibition will officially open on Saturday, June 14, 2025, at 6:30 PM, with a vernissage featuring a live musical performance by the artists themselves.

At a time when Venice stands as a global epicenter of contemporary art thanks to the Biennale, “Subverthecity” positions itself as a parallel event that joins the growing wave of critical narratives seeking, through art, spaces of truth and resistance.

An Opportunity for Padua and the Veneto Region

The participation of Jacopo Dotti, a Padua-based artist active for years in the urban art and graphic intervention scene, also represents a major opportunity for the Veneto region to gain visibility within the context of critical and avant-garde art. His work—already acknowledged in national independent circuits—brings for the first time in Italy a curated, systematic reflection on subvertising, in direct dialogue with Venice’s urban landscape and the international flow of the Biennale.

“Subverthecity – Design to Distract”Solo exhibition by Jacopo Dotti and Marco StranoItinerarte Gallery, Venice (Dorsoduro)📅 From June 14, 2025🎶 Vernissage with live performance – Saturday, June 14 at 6:30 PM