Totò Cariello - Eyes Wide Shut

The exhibition Eyes Wide Shut by Totò Cariello, with a critical text by Gabriele Perretta, is hosted at the Millennium Gallery in Bologna from February 6 to 28, 2026, as part of Art City.

The project addresses violence against women as a widespread and structural condition, neither sensationalized nor explicitly narrated. The works—reworked polaroids, urban pictorial images, and installations—construct an unstable visual field, where the gaze is exposed and interpretation is never reassuring. The faces, altered and traversed, seek neither empathy nor recognition, while the cities painted in black and white appear as spaces of control and normalization. The environmental installation, composed of black and white bands with empty shoes, directly involves the viewer’s body, evoking absences and interrupted movements.

Eyes Wide Shut offers neither synthesis nor explanations, but rather a visual reflection on the present, where violence manifests as a crisis of language and of the gaze.

A radical project that challenges perception and returns to the public the responsibility of their own act of looking.