On the occasion of the extensive solo exhibition, Alberto Colliva - The Deception of the Image, presented across three venues in the artist's hometown, Bologna, Studio la Linea Verticale dedicates the Link Room, modifying its setup, to the essential elements of the painter. Following Alberto's example, we too wanted to redistribute physical spaces and, along with them, imaginative spaces. We brought the painter's tools to play with time in what was the office's library. The brush bristles are stained with the gray of the dust that accumulated during Alberto's painting hiatus, and the tubes of dry paint have become motionless sculptural pieces. The composition prominently features medical tools for measuring the skull, compasses, and a heavy iron protractor, a square that resembles an antique barber's blade—all indicating the precision, order, and discipline with which the artist worked to create clean cuts and subtle slashes that characterize his painting. Two levels are filled with small-sized canvases, aiming to reproduce how they are archived in his studio, 'beautiful against beautiful,' as he would say. Alberto's studio, reconstructed in miniature in the gallery's office, is a way to feel even closer to him. The hand is the visible part of the brain (Immanuel Kant). We've talked about heads, and now we have to talk about hands because they are the perfect visualization of the painter's work, a task both physical and mental. Alberto certainly did not refrain from focusing long on this subject, a classic painterly exercise, and he dedicated a small canvas to each hand, placing them in his spatial scenography that alternates between voids and solids. Thus, these extremities rest against the painting as if they were its venerable relics, the absolute symbols of art and the artist, advocates and witnesses of his aura. As the dynamics of being dictate, everything ends where everything begins. To close the circle, there is the blank canvas, one of the many prepared by Alberto himself, directed towards a future that has remained frozen in earthly time for fourteen years. Now that this time has been released, the canvas infinitely awaits the artist to fill it with strokes of Emptiness.