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The Serious Game of Fairy Tales
Interview with Giuseppe Veneziano by Chiara Canali

by the editorial staff, December 12, 2025

With Every Fairy Tale Is a Game, a solo exhibition hosted at the PUNTO SULL’ARTE gallery in Varese, Giuseppe Veneziano returns to one of the most fertile territories of his pictorial research: the appropriation of pre-existing images and their reconfiguration into a narrative, pop, and unsettling key. An undisputed protagonist of Italian New Pop and among the leading exponents of the Italian Newbrow movement—formulated by critic Ivan Quaroni—Veneziano has, over the past twenty-five years, developed a visual lexicon nourished by heterogeneous codes, ranging from sacred iconography to comics, from art history to advertising culture, in order to produce satirical allegories of contemporary society.

In this exhibition, the theme of fairy tales—often filtered through the Disneyesque imaginary—becomes a device for interrogating society, suspended between innocence and transgression, desire and discipline, myth and market. Vladimir Propp’s famous essay Morphology of the Folktale also demonstrates how fairy tales are constructed upon a deep structure made up of functions and recurring schemes, regardless of time and place.