Simone Berno
was born in Padova on January 20, 1975.
Matter, Time, The Oneiric
Moving away from the fast-paced trends of the art market and today’s visual saturation, Simone Berno’s practice is driven by a distinct conceptual and formal rigor. Developed over a thirty-year independent career, Berno has built a body of work centered on a direct physical engagement with matter, the manipulation of time, and the spatial redefinition of experience.
Graphic Roots and Urban Actions (1990s)
Berno’s evolution takes root in the 1990s with a series of dense, multifaceted drawings where the structural logic of Cubism merges with the evocative impulses of Surrealism. This visual language serves as the foundation of his practice, fragmenting form across shifting planes to reveal a hidden, dreamlike reality. This inquiry naturally expanded into Street Art and independent urban interventions, including actions with the Roman collective Arte da Rubare alongside subtle disruptions of daily life. In one key project, Berno anonymously replaced factory prints inside store-bought frames at commercial outlets with his own original works, returning them to display shelves accompanied by valid proofs of purchase.
Living Matter and Industrial Sculpture (2000s)
In the early 2000s, Berno shifted toward industrial sculpture, working with steel, copper, and brass salvaged from industrial archeology sites and decommissioned factories. Hand-cut, bent, and pierced, the metals retain their oxidation, abrasion, and corrosion as integral elements of his formal vocabulary. The patina of time becomes both color and memory: metal ceases to be a passive support and turns into a living material carrying historical weight.
Inaccessibility and Decay:
The Poetic Hotel Project (2019–Present)
This exploration of time, memory, and the artwork's accessibility culminates in Poetic Hotel. Transforming a hotel abandoned since 1997 into a site-specific intervention, Berno preserved the building in its decaying state amid original furnishings and traces of past lives. The project offers a radical commentary on artistic experience, turning ruin into space for contemplation.
In a gesture opposing the commercial spectacle of the art market, access to the upper floors was permanently sealed and forbidden. The artwork is thus removed from view, left to the natural decay of the building and its eventual demolition: an act of independence that rejects immediate approval to assert the artwork as an elusive and inaccessible dimension.
Contemporary Iconography:
S/He Generation and X-Silhouette
Alongside his graphic and sculptural work, Berno developed a new phase of expression through the series S/He Generation and X-Silhouette. Here, the artist integrates contemporary digital tools to condense form into an immediate iconography. However, this transition to digital media does not surrender to dematerialization or mass reproduction: each image is transferred onto paper, reaffirming its physical status as a unique, unrepeatable work of art. While S/He Generation pairs leaf forms with the mother figure to address themes of genesis, environmental stewardship, and generational inheritance, X-Silhouette reduces the human form to the outline of a shooting target. The latter denounces the violence and dehumanization embedded in daily life, offering a critical standpoint that serves as a starting point for reversing this trajectory.
Environmental Space:
Passus (2026) and Eclecticism A landmark moment in the artist's exhibition history is the environmental installation “Passus. Attraverso confini sottili”, 2026.
Curated by Nicola Galvan and presented by the Cultural Affairs Department of the City of Padua at Galleria Civica Cavour, the exhibition shifts the sense of disorientation onto a spatial and perceptual dimension. Using over one thousand meters of cellophane and reflective thermal sheets, Berno transformed the gallery architecture into a fluid, unstable environment, housing fourteen sculptural and physical works that trace thirty years of research into the physical relationship between body, space, and matter.
Berno’s resistance to categorization within a single movement or a purely decorative style stems from his eclectic nature.
He instinctively crosses contextual boundaries to explore new mediums, ranging from posters created for the Cheap Festival in Bologna to the distribution of his work through the dynamic platforms of Metabox.
His research remains a steadfast commitment to independence, the endurance of matter through time, and the continuous subversion of perceptual limits, guiding the viewer into a suspended environment, at once surreal, dystopian, and timeless.