FRENCH PLACE is an art organisation and an incubator for critical contemporary practices. Operating as a proto–institution — situated between an art foundation and a gallery — we support experimentation, foster exchange, and offer time and space for collaboration.

Founded at 9 French Place, Shoreditch, London — FRENCH PLACE enters its next chapter in Milan, where our programme extends across exhibitions, an artist residency, and research–driven initiatives that support deep engagement with contemporary practice.

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ART-O-RAMA MARSEILLE

CECILIA MENTASTI, WITH MY HEART IN YOUR HAND

28.08.26—30.08.26

Cecilia Mentasti, With My Heart in Your Hand, Art-o-Rama Marseille 2026, installation views, courtesy FRENCH PLACE & the artist, ph Francesco Paleari

Cecilia Mentasti, Untitled (Sanfratello), 2026, Art-o-Rama Marseille, Silkscreen on paper, 150 x 110 cm, 59 3/50 x 43 31/100 in, Edition of 5 plus 2 artist's proofs, courtesy FRENCH PLACE & the artist,
ph Francesco Paleari

Cecilia Mentasti, With My Heart in Your Hand, Art-o-Rama Marseille 2026, installation views, courtesy FRENCH PLACE & the artist, ph Francesco Paleari

Cecilia Mentasti, Ovunque ma non qui, 2026, felt-tip pen, marker, sticker on paper, 53 x 76 x 4 cm
20 87/100 x 29 23/25 x 1 14/25 in, Art-o-Rama Marseille 2026, installation views, courtesy FRENCH PLACE & the artist, ph Francesco Paleari

NEWS:
CECILIA MENTASTI WINS COLLEZIONE TAURISANO “BECAUSE OF MANY SUNS” PRIZE

Cecilia Mentasti is the winner of the 2026 edition of the Because of Many Suns Prize at Art-O-Rama in Marseille, with the acquisition of two works from the series Ovunque ma non qui (Anywhere but Here).
This marks the first time the prize has been awarded to an Italian gallery and artist at ART-O-RAMA in Marseille, making the recognition particularly meaningful to us.
Cecilia’s work stood out for the freshness and audacity of her approach, combining a strong formal presence with a practice that feels both precise and open.

THE PROJECT

Marseille, August 28th to August 30th — For Art-O-Rama 2026, FRENCH PLACE presents With My Heart in Your Hand, a solo booth by Cecilia Mentasti. Unfolding within the context of the art fair, the project introduces subtle deviations into the institutional and economic mechanisms through which visibility and value are produced. Domestic air becomes an olfactory landscape of memory; an artist’s oeuvre is fragmented through the gesture of throwing confetti; two paintings remain hidden while their administrative document becomes visible; a map points towards an exit; monetary exchange gives way to an exchange of time and labour. With My Heart in Your Hand takes shape through objects that initially appear innocent, yet share a logic of displacement and legitimation: things shift from one context to another, while the structures that authorise and validate them become part of the work itself.

The first work we encounter is Strawberry Artwork (2025), an environmental installation composed of household appliances used to regulate air in Cecilia Mentasti’s home, which are subtly modified to emit the scent of strawberries. Through a process the artist describes as tuning, these everyday devices are stripped of their utilitarian function and transformed into atmospheric objects, turning the domestic space into a sensory landscape where memory, intimacy and fiction intersect. Their choreography of puffs and breaths recreates an artificial “wild strawberry patch,” referencing Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957). In the movie, the elderly Isak Borg returns to the house of his childhood summers, where a strawberry patch evokes a lost world of memory and longing, a refuge from the emotional failures of adult life, where desire still tastes like ripe fruit.

The emotional centre of the presentation lies in two interconnected works, Sanfratello (2025) and Untitled (Sanfratello) (2026), linked to Giovanni Sanfratello, a forgotten painter and partner of intellectual Aldo Braibanti (1922–2014). Their relationship became entangled in one of Italy’s most controversial legal cases: Braibanti was convicted of plagio, a now-abolished offence of psychological domination, in proceedings widely understood as effectively putting homosexuality itself on trial. Sanfratello was forcibly confined to a psychiatric institution and excluded from public life, his artistic practice eclipsed by the violence of these events. Two of his paintings, belonging to curator Simone S. Melis, are kept in Cecilia Mentasti’s home within a display created by the artist. Sanfratello (2025) holds the canvases face-to-face in an embrace-like structure, concealing them from view. Here, concealment becomes a form of protection, respecting the discretion with which Sanfratello chose to live and questioning the act of looking itself.
At the fair, Sanfratello and the two canvases it contains are safely stored away. In their absence, Untitled (Sanfratello) occupies the booth: a large-scale silkscreen of the export document required for their passage from Italy to France, laid on an unmade bed. What is withheld from view is thus made present through its bureaucratic trace. With this inversion of presence and absence, an administrative procedure becomes an unexpected gesture of recognition: through the document, Giovanni Sanfratello is formally recognised and certified as an artist by the Italian State for the first time.

The question of circulation continues through Kit Festa (2026), composed of confetti cut from the oeuvre of Italian painter Tano Festa. The general catalogue is fragmented into hundreds of pieces, released into the air and left to settle across the fair. Art history becomes a joyful, tactile and ephemeral game, shifting from the permanence of the reproduced image to the fleeting temporality of celebration.

This tension between presence and absence extends to a drawing that reproduces the fair’s emergency evacuation plan, rendered with stickers designed by Cecilia Mentasti. Usually peripheral and almost invisible, the plan introduces another possible movement: not the circulation of visitors towards artworks or acquisitions, but a route leading outside. Requested by a person close to the artist, who is suffering from agoraphobia, the map depends on the responses of the institutions addressed, including Art-O-Rama, thereby making refusal or non-response part of the work.

Finally, a series of photographic images, framed into Dove soaps, introduces an alternative economy of exchange. Rather than being purchased with conventional currency, each is acquired through a one-to-one agreement between artist and collector, in exchange for forty hours of labour performed for the artist.

Across the presentation, presence is never given without some form of displacement: Sanfratello’s paintings enter the fair only to remain concealed; Tano Festa’s images become visible through fragmentation; an evacuation plan enters the exhibition by pointing towards a way out; ownership is exchanged not for money, but for someone else’s time and labour. Something moves, disappears or changes hands so that something else can take its place.

“Love, down here the climate is the same and gentle, softened by rain. I miss you, I miss you very much. You know, then, that this is the description of our love: that I am never where you are and you are never where I am,” wrote Giorgio Manganelli. A perfect ekphrasis for Cecilia Mentasti’s work. Here, too, relationships seem defined by an impossibility of fully occupying the same place. Works, people, documents and forms of value cross paths, exchange positions and separate again. What emerges is an understanding of the artwork not as an autonomous object, but as something that exists through these movements: temporarily held within a constellation of people, histories, institutions and gestures of care.

CECILIA MENTASTI

Cecilia Mentasti (Varese, 1993) is a visual artist and art worker. She studied painting at Brera Academy of Fine Arts and trained as a registrar at the Botticino Restoration School. In 2019, she co-founded the artist-run space BRACE BRACE.
In 2024, she was awarded the Per Chi Crea! grant promoted by MIC and SIAE for the audio work a place to stay, presented in a solo exhibition at Care/of, Milan.

Her work has been presented in several solo exhibitions, including Solo Family & Friends, curated by Marta Cereda and Simone S. Melis at Spazio Prugg and Superness, Milan (2025); Dissing, curated by Stefano Giuri and Gabriele Tosi at Toast Project Space, Florence (2025); A Place to Stay, curated by Marta Cereda and Laura Lamonea at Care/of, Milan (2024); and Trimmed After a Pattern, curated by Thomas Ba at EXAMATO, Milan (2024). Earlier solo presentations include Serenata (with Enzo Forese), curated by Simone S. Melis at Castel Hörtenberg, Bolzano/Bozen (2022); have you ever been / where you already are?, curated by Flavia Albu at BRACE BRACE, Milan (2021); Safari (not the exception but the rule), curated by Thomas Ba and Laura Lamonea at the Video Sound Art Festival, Museo di Storia Naturale, Milan (2021); and 18 artworks that couldn’t fit in a window, curated by co_atto at Spazio co_atto, Milan (2021).
Her work has also been included in group exhibitions such as CORALE, FRENCH PLACE, Milan (29 January–28 February 2026); Vedersi da fuori, vedersi da dentro, curated by Angel Moya Garcia at Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice (2023); Adesso No, curated by Bruno Barsanti and Gabriele Tosi at NAM – Manifattura Tabacchi, Florence (2022); Untitled (Cagno), curated by Annika Pettini at Hyperlocal Festival, Milan (2022); and FORTUNATO, curated by ex-amato at Galleria Luca Tommasi, Milan (2022).
Her work has been supported by residencies including Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Palazzo Carminati, Venice (2022–2023); Lapsus, Timișoara, Romania (2019); and the Video Sound Art residency at Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo (2019). In 2018, she received the research grant "How to Be the Other Way" from the Centre for Film and Ethics, Queen Mary University of London, and Fondazione Pini, Milan, and participated in The Hidden City, curated by Cloe Piccoli with Stefano Graziani at Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo.

List of works

Press Kit

ART-O-RAMA MARSEILLE

NEWS:CECILIA MENTASTI WINS COLLEZIONE TAURISANO “BECAUSE OF MANY SUNS” PRIZE

THE PROJECT

NEWS:
CECILIA MENTASTI WINS COLLEZIONE TAURISANO “BECAUSE OF MANY SUNS” PRIZE