Magiae Naturalis

Exhibition by Josse Renda

Curated by Irene Panzani

[exhibition text for the show that took place from October 23 to November 9, 2025, at Piazza dell’Arancio 22]

Number 22 in Piazza dell’Arancio is transformed for GIUNGLA Remix into a treasure-box theatre inhabited by the works of Josse Renda. Not an exhibition, but a narrative path that leads into the artist’s sensibility: fragile and powerful, light and profound, like a line that carves into matter or like a word that ignites vision.

Renda’s research begins with his encounter with Giovan Battista della Porta’s physiognomy of plants, discovered in the Cesare Bicchi Library of the Botanical Garden of Lucca. From there arises an ideal dialogue with the sixteenth-century playwright, scientist and alchemist, and with his most surprising work: Magiae Naturalis. A world-book, begun by its author at just fourteen years of age, which over the centuries has interwoven science, magic and imagination, anticipating both the wonder and the contradictions of modernity.

Renda gathers this legacy and reworks it through artistic practices and speculative dramaturgy workshops, such as the one developed with the students of the Liceo Classico N. Machiavelli in Lucca: a process which, moving between historic classrooms and natural science cabinets, generated self-produced tarot cards, words, signs, and drawing sheets. Fragile and precious objects, capable of opening breaches in reality and revealing the dimension of the ineffable.

His research does not stop: it continues through wanderings between Italy, Germany and France, in dialogue with museums and scientific institutes, in search of traces, relics, marvels. It is thus that, from the Museum of Natural Sciences of Naples, he receives an unexpected artefact – a huge animal calculus, almost like a work of art – or that he lets himself be enchanted in France by the tale of Peau d’âne by Charles Perrault, translated in Italy by Carlo Collodi, where the boundary between science and magic dissolves in the force of storytelling.

Throughout all this, Renda’s work is never pure collecting, but transformation: every fragment gathered – a stone, a leaf, a scrap of paper – becomes alive, speaking, transfigured into artistic gesture. It is a practice of poetry, an act of enchantment: to give voice to matter, to return to the world the wonder received from it.

As Milan Kundera writes, the poet belongs to the “lyrical age,” that youth which questions existence without ever exhausting its questions. This is how Renda inhabits the world: with a lyrical gaze, with an inexhaustible curiosity that turns everyday accumulation – notebooks, doodles, notes, online sharing – into a visual and poetic alphabet. A serious game, infectious, like that of a child building their own world through play.

His works, gathered in this theatre-exhibition, are invitations to adopt the same posture: to see with lyrical eyes, to traverse the jungle of images and things, to let oneself be surprised by metamorphosis. Finally, to enter his Magiae Naturalis: an intimate and enchanted encyclopedia, where science and magic still clasp hands.

WORKS ON DISPLAY 

Come fiore Cibele moristi; terracotta, iron and twine, 2024, 60 × 120 × 245 cm

Peau d’âne; watercolour on shaped paper, overall dimensions variable

Peau d’âne; papier-mâché mask with painted straw, 36 × 25 × 8 cm

Di produr nuove piante (series); watercolour on shaped paper, 15 × 25 cm each element, overall dimensions variable

Le feu du Ravi fou (series); watercolour on shaped paper, 15 × 25 cm each element, overall dimensions variable

Al fare che una cosa risplenda nell’oscuro; terracotta, kaolin, wood, mirror, variable dimensions, height 80 cm

Die neue Morgante; pigment on cotton, 2025, 290 × 260 × 30 cm

Baedeker lunaire; pigment on stretched cotton, 2025, 235 × 140 cm

Een vogel cantari (fontaine); pigment on cotton, 2025, 150 × 75 cm

BIO

Josse Renda is a visual artist. In his work, the practice of painting intersects with writing and collaborative research. He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera.

In 2021 he presented the performance Mas Anjello en Holland at Superstudio Più, Milan; in 2022 the study for Marsyas de Sybaris at Palazzo Bronzo in Genoa, and that on La vie merveilleuse de Gargantua et de Pantagruel in Antwerp.

He has taken part in the projects TU35, Centro Pecci in Prato; D’apres la Peinture, curated by Stefania Rinaldi and CUT Prato; Reperti, curated by Irene Panzani and Shared Office For the Arts-SOFA, former Psychiatric Hospital of Maggiano, Lucca; De Pingendi Natura, Srisa Art Gallery, Florence; Mnemosyne | Le Grand Tour, Reggio Calabria; and cantiere sussidiario, Guilmi Art Project, Chieti.