By subverting the dictum “Less is more,” a new vision of art and reality emerges under the banner of “Less is bore” or, as Arthur Jafa caustically titled a recent exhibition at MoMA, “Less is morbid.”

The works by Piero Gilardi, Susanne Kutter, Aldo Mondino, Mario Schifano, Daniel Spoerri, The Cool Couple, and Rinus Van de Velde on view in the exhibition reflect an anti-minimalist tendency driven by the contamination of languages, tonalities, and media, as though exposed to an external virus that disrupts a pre-existing equilibrium.

What emerges is a celebration of visual exuberance that goes beyond the classical and even beyond realism itself, which nonetheless characterizes the works themeselves. These often engage themes such as duplication, metamorphosis, illogical rupture, and the irreducible fullness of nature. The free and expansive interpretation of space—whether mental, physical, historical, or digital—serves as the common denominator among these works, which adopt a strategy of rethinking the limits and unexplored potential of mimesis.

The result is a body of images that, rather than being the outcome of a primary excavation, are the product of successive enrichments, shifts of state, stratifications, and collisions between word, image, and concept. This is not realism tout court, but rather a set of hybrid forms of realism in which the direct referentiality of word and image is challenged—also through irony and the artists’ conceptual play. The shared terrain is that of a more egalitarian realism—transversal in scope and more democratic in its horizontality—where attention is distributed equally between protagonists and minor characters. Here, even while remaining grounded in realism, art contributes to a progressive defamiliarization of reality, echoing the words of David Foster Wallace, who wrote: “The literary system for representing today’s world must render it almost unrecognizable.”