LUDI: Two Masters, One Game. The dialogue between Fulvio Morella and Franco Mazzucchelli

We are pleased to present the curator’s full text exclusively. Until 16 October 2025, Palazzo Lombardia hosts LUDI – Art as an Embrace, the new exhibition project by Fulvio Morella and Franco Mazzucchelli, curated by Sabino Maria Frassà.
Promoted by Cramum and Regione Lombardia within the Cultural Olympiad of Milano–Cortina 2026, and held under the High Patronage of the European Parliament, the show unfolds in the heart of Milan (Monday–Friday 10:00–19:00, free admission). The exhibition presents an unprecedented dialogue between two major figures of Italian contemporary art, transforming play into an aesthetic and inclusive experience.

Critical Text “LUDI: Two Masters, One Game”

Sabino Maria Frassà – critical essay for “LUDI – Art as an Embrace”

Forty years after the historic collaboration between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, two protagonists of today’s Italian art scene, Franco Mazzucchelli and Fulvio Morella, bring to Palazzo Lombardia LUDI – Art as an Embrace: a project born from deep personal friendship and a shared vision of art as a vehicle for relation, knowledge and exchange. LUDI forms part of the cycle “I limiti non esistono” (“Limits Do Not Exist”), dedicated to inclusion, resilience and the overcoming of barriers on the road to the Milano–Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

More than a two-person show, LUDI is a unified project built around the concept of ludus—the Latin term for both “play” and “school.” Reviving the ancient idea, dear to Plato and the Romans, that play can be not only diversion but also formation, Mazzucchelli and Morella propose an art that joyfully involves, educates and creates cohesion. In this sense they echo Plato’s Laws (“If we learn while playing, the lesson takes root more deeply”) and Maria Montessori’s insight that “play is the work of the child.”

What gives LUDI its force is its inter-generational scope: it addresses not only children but also adults, seeking to awaken the playful dimension often repressed in grown life and to recognise play as a motor of creativity, freedom and connection. The project resonates with Johan Huizinga’s warning in Homo Ludens (1938) that the loss of free play risks cultural impoverishment; art, he wrote, “was born in play and is still a play.”

LUDI thus embodies a shared vision: art as formative, regenerative and participatory experience, capable of forging deep connections and releasing dormant creative energies. Like Warhol and Basquiat with their Olympic Rings (1985), Morella and Mazzucchelli start from a common symbol—but instead of deconstructing a logo, they give shape to the authentic values of the Olympics and the ludi, celebrating inclusion, joy, collaboration and the surpassing of limits.

Their “joint” art invites the public to step into the ludus itself and become active players in the artistic game. Through inflatable and wooden sculptures, tactile surfaces and open forms, the two artists build a participatory environment where the viewer is not a passive observer but the protagonist of creative play. The works are not merely in dialogue: they are conceived together, the outcome of a two-year collaborative process in which each offers technical mastery without competition, turning friendship into a creative force.

Mazzucchelli, pioneer of inflatable and social art since the 1960s, uses light, mobile PVC structures to transform space and stimulate bodily participation, heirs to his historic Abbandoni. Morella, master of wood-turning and Braille surfaces, brings tactile, multisensory pieces that cross the boundaries between art and design and centre on touch, exploration and sensory inclusion. For both, interaction is foundational: a work exists fully only when lived, touched, inhabited and shared.

Together they shape primary forms and living surfaces, producing works to be explored with body, eyes, hands and heart. LUDI – Art as an Embrace becomes a rare, innovative project where personal friendship turns into a creative gesture and art itself becomes the place where individual excellence and openness to the other coexist and amplify one another—a hymn to collaboration, joy and the beauty of encounter.