Sweet Faces, currently on view at Oblong Contemporary, brings together Italian artist Silvio Porzionato and French artist Laurence Jenkell in a vivid dialogue between portraiture and pop sculpture. The exhibition, which is an encounter between introspection and playfulness, solemn emotion and radiant colour, invites viewers to reflect on how identity, desire, and memory intertwine. The show will be open to the public until 15 November 2025.
Porzionato’s monumental oil portraits, rendered with remarkable precision and sensitivity, focus on anonymous faces that become universal icons of human emotion. Through close-ups stripped of context, his paintings capture stillness, solitude, and the quiet depth of being seen. Meanwhile, Jenkell’s glossy candy sculptures transform the ordinary symbol of sweetness into a metaphor for pleasure, nostalgia, and transformation. Her signature “wrapping” gesture, material twisted upon itself, turns coloured plexiglass, aluminium, or bronze into objects that recall both childhood delight and adult reflection.
In this juxtaposition, Sweet Faces reveals the complexity of modern sensibility: the face as a mirror of the soul and the candy as a crystallised memory of pleasure. The pairing of Porzionato’s stately faces with Jenkell’s luminous candies bridges emotional and sensory experience and offers a contemporary exploration of humanity’s dual longing for sincerity and joy.
About the artists
Silvio Porzionato (b. 1971, Moncalieri, Italy) earned a high school diploma in Arts before spending a decade working in design for a Turin-based company. Eventually, he left that career to devote himself fully to painting. His practice combines classical technique with a modern sensibility, working primarily from photographs of ordinary people to elevate them into monumental figures that transcend individuality. His work, often bathed in a muted palette and meticulous brushwork, captures the fragile dignity of emotion and the universal resonance of introspection.
Porzionato’s artworks have been featured in many solo and group exhibitions in countries such as his homeland, the USA, France, Switzerland, and Belgium, to name a few. In 2011, he was selected for the 54th Biennale di Venezia, exhibiting in the Regional Pavilion of Piemonte and the Italian Pavilion in Turin. In 2013, Porzionato created Codice Temporale, a monumental series of 112 portraits for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sicily (MACS) that examined the passage of time through the human face. His accolades include selections for the Mondadori Art Prize and awards such as the Critics’ Prize at Art Saluzzo and the Leonardo Award (2010).
Laurence Jenkell (b. 1965, Bourges, France) is a self-taught artist internationally famous for her Wrappings series, brightly coloured sculptures in the form of candies, realised in materials ranging from plexiglass and aluminium to marble and Murano glass. Her work merges Pop Art exuberance with a conceptual edge, turning the familiar sweetness of candy into a sculptural emblem of indulgence, transformation, and the human appetite for beauty.
Elevated to the rank of Knight of the French Order of Arts and Letters in 2019, Jenkell has displayed her creations in multiple solo and group exhibitions in France, Peru, Germany, the USA, and the UK, among other countries. Her works are part of major collections worldwide, including the Copelouzos Family Art Museum (Athens, Greece), Museum of Fine Arts (Calais, France), and The World of Coca-Cola (Atlanta, GA, USA).
You can learn more about Sweet Faces on the official web page of the exhibition.
Additionally, you might be interested in visiting Whispers of the Past and The Imaginary Museum.
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