It’s not such a long way from taste to disgust. Quite literally, it travels from the mouth to the stomach, through the intestines and down to the anus. Since Flyerperson (2024) and Shitperson (2024), which respectively depicted a humanised shit fly and a shit man and explored the cultural dimension of disgust, Marco Pezzotta now moves back, in the opposite direction, towards the question of taste. Yours Tastefully is the title of his exhibition. The phrase plays with the conventions of English correspondence — Yours sincerely, Yours faithfully, Yours truly — replacing them with tastefully, meaning “with taste”. An incorrect formula, in other words, but one that already presupposes knowledge of the correct one. The détournement thus plays on a kind of awkwardness: the desire to conform to a convention while at the same time demonstrating an awareness of its rules. Like politeness, taste presupposes knowledge and mastery of certain codes, which in turn signal social belonging. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu showed that taste is not a natural or innate faculty, but a social construction shaped by one’s origins, education and accumulated cultural capital. What we like — in music, art, food or clothing — thus contributes to situating us within social space. If the tastes of the dominant classes appear natural, it is precisely because they are acquired so early and so deeply that they come to seem self-evident. With this exhibition, Marco Pezzotta explores his relationship with his parents and the role taste plays within it: that of a child who becomes an adult and, through access to a different education, learns a new language, acquires different codes and, with them, a different taste.

Following his recurring interest in the interdependence of bodies and in what it reveals about their permeability as well as their vulnerability, Marco Pezzotta places his mother at the centre of this exhibition. This is not the first time he has involved her in his work. In 2022, they made a series of crochet works together. This time, however, the focus is directly on her, and on the bond between them. All the works in the exhibition were made in collaboration with her: Annamaria produced the crocheted elements.

the lips shaping a small o” (2026), a series of two glass discs compressing a crocheted doily, is particularly eloquent in its exploration of what taste implies in human relationships. From a distance, simple forms can be distinguished: a circle, a cross, or two superimposed prohibition signs. Marco asked his mother to crochet these symbols specifically. As one approaches, the technique of crochet becomes visible, giving the work a new “taste”. This form of crochet remains associated with a particular period and a particular style. I myself think of my grandmother, whose furniture was covered with crocheted doilies. Historically, crochet was practised by the working classes, particularly by women, as a domestic activity and a modest source of income. In the twentieth century, it was also adopted by haute couture houses such as Chanel and Schiaparelli. Today, this distinction is less clear-cut. Crochet can be claimed both as a form of popular craft heritage and as a legitimate artistic medium. It nevertheless remains a craft that was long rendered invisible because of its association with domestic labour and women’s work. In this case, the forms crocheted by Annamaria were not made to fulfil their usual function of protecting a table. They are neither curtains nor clothes. They are above all signs: of a skill that Annamaria has mastered, of a possible origin, but also of an exchange between a mother and her son, the tangible result of an interaction between two people. Pressed between two transparent discs that preserve the object, these sculptures, slightly recessed vertically into the wall, evoke hard drives preserving a memory. The glass also recalls the function of display cases, behind which objects are placed for protection. It removes them from everyday use and lends them a greater sense of preciousness. Through this artistic collaboration, crochet thus crosses the boundary between domestic craft and art.
The series of four photographs Things can never be caught napping (2026), showing small plastic figures seen from behind and drawn from the world of comics, approaches the question of taste through the preservation of objects. Roger Rabbit and the characters from Popeye belong to the world of childhood, popular culture and, perhaps, kitsch. These objects are ostensibly without monetary value. Collecting and preserving them, however, reveals another kind of value, an affective one. These objects have a life of their own within our lives. They make us smile or remind us of moments of simple joy. Whether we like it or not, the attachment to the objects, images and atmospheres of childhood can unsettle the sense of taste.

It is precisely within this gap that the books of the French writer Annie Ernaux find their place. Where Bourdieu describes the social mechanisms that make taste an instrument of distinction, Ernaux experiences and describes their effects from within. In Les Armoires vides (1974), La Place (1983) and Une femme (1987), she reflects on her parents and the growing gap between their tastes, their ways of speaking and living, and those she has acquired by acquiring a new language and moving into a different social milieu. Taste thus becomes the site of an intimate contradiction: learning the codes of another world without ceasing to be attached to the one from which one comes. Bourdieu’s central concept of habitus describes precisely this persistence, within the body and behaviour, of dispositions acquired during childhood. For the transfuge de classe — someone born into one social milieu who moves into another — taste can thus become the site of a double belonging, but also of discomfort. One no longer fully recognises oneself in one’s milieu of origin, yet never feels entirely legitimate in the one one enters. The traces of one persist within the codes of the other.

Yours Tastefully explores the bond with one’s parents and how it changes as conventions and tastes evolve. It explores memory, what we choose to hold on to, and what endures despite social shifts. Perhaps this is even more true when one becomes an artist, in a field where taste plays a direct role in shaping one’s practice and identity. But the exhibition also reveals what precedes taste as a means of distinction: childhood, its memories and the emotional bond that ties us to things. At the entrance to the exhibition, Little fête at the foot (2026) depicts a figure smoking, with a cloud above them, the whole scene sandwiched between two glass plates. The work captures the memory of a childhood atmosphere, that of parents who smoked, but also that of the famous fog of northern Italy, the nebbia padana, which often enveloped Seriate, the town where Marco grew up. This fog, which has almost become part of the collective imagination of the Po Valley, permeates the region’s culture, from literature to cinema (Antonioni and Fellini refer to it). In Little fête at the foot, the crocheted smoke thus blends with the memory of the fog. It evokes a moment that is at once everyday — perhaps even banal — yet also deeply intimate, gentle and marvellous. Here, it is no longer a question of taste: taste has not yet been formed in childhood, nor have social differences. All that remains is simply a sensation — perhaps that of a love without distinction.