The Association Friends of Palazzo Buonaccorsi and the Municipality of Macerata, Macerata Museums, Macerata Culture, together with the Marche Region and the Carima Foundation, are delighted to announce that Matteo Costanzo has won the Pannaggi/New Generation Prize 2025. The artist’s solo show CTRL+Z/ will be staged from November 28, 2025 to March 29, 2026 on the noble floor of the Civic Museums in Palazzo Buonaccorsi, Macerata. The event is held with the sponsorship of the University of Macerata, the Academy of Fine Arts, and the Municipality of Recanati.
Matteo Costanzo, born in 1985 in Rome, trained in the Marche region, graduating from the Scuola del Libro in Urbino and the Accademia di Belle Arti in the same city. Since 2013 he has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions and artistic residencies across Italy, earning finalist and winner distinctions in several awards. His residencies include Bocs Art (Cosenza), Viafarini (Milan), Cammino Contemporaneo (Rieti), and Ramo (Giulianova). Solo shows to note include La Maschera del Destino (Spaziosei, Pescara), Nessuno è padre ad un altro (Tomav, Moresco), SITCOM (Pesaro), American Drumpf (Tomav, Moresco) and Sala d’Attesa (Musei Civici di Pesaro). Costanzo’s work has been featured in numerous group shows such as Lezioni di Resistenza (Spazio Y, Rome), Riportando tutto a casa (Museo delle Navi Romane, Nemi), Terrazza due mondi (Spoleto), Tales from the inside_out (Co_Atto, Milan), I Sibburchi (Lecce), Tra Luci ed Ombre (Forte Malatesta, Ascoli Piceno), Presenti! (Palazzo Lucarini Contemporary, Trevi), and Existence is co-exi-stance (MOCA-feast, Monsano). His awards include finalist positions in Arteam Prize (2018), Fabbri Prize (2020), Premio Nazionale delle Arti XII (2017), Combat Prize (2023), and Prisma Prize (2024). He won the Biennale Giovani Artisti Marchigiani in 2014 and the 68th edition of the Premio Salvi in 2018. His work has been documented in publications such as the Annuario d’arte italiana (Quadriennale di Roma, 2022) and 222 artisti emergenti su cui investire (2024).
The Pannaggi/New Generation Prize, now in its eighth edition, was conceived by the Association Friends of Palazzo Buonaccorsi to celebrate and support young artists under 40 from the Marche region. The prize aims to enhance their visibility within the national and international art scenes, nurturing emerging voices and expanding opportunities for dialogue and discovery.
This year’s selection committee, composed of Paola Ballesi, Katiuscia Cassetta, Loretta Fabrizi, Andrea Giusti, Paolo Gobbi, Marina Mentoni, Mauro Mazziero, Maria Letizia Paiato, Giuliana Pascucci, awarded the prize to Matteo Costanzo (Rome, 1985) with the following motivation: “Matteo Costanzo proposes an open dialogue between museum conservation and the constant and fluid loss of information in the contemporary mainstream. His works—polymorphic architectures that function as post-media ruins oscillating between presence and absence—speak to the transience of the digital file, which can be endlessly altered with the command ‘Ctrl+Z,’ a reference reflected in the title of the exhibition to remind us that art is an open process and the artist takes a leading role in the complex and enigmatic construction of reality.”
Curated by Paola Ballesi, Costanzo’s CTRL+Z unfolds as an immersive and conceptually vibrant parcours that invites visitors to reflect on the tensions and fragilities of the contemporary era. Through collage, sticker-painting, video loops, and installations, the artist constructs a visual universe in which the very material of communication—images, words, icons, fragments of information— is decomposed and reassembled into new forms of meaning. The works are distinguished by a strong plastic and chromatic component achieved with extruded polystyrene, liquid plastic, and acrylic paint. They appear as radiant, unstable surfaces that embody the disorientation of an hyper-connected humanity captive to information overload.
In dialogue with the historical works of Palazzo Buonaccorsi’s civic collection, Costanzo’s research creates a resonant visual and conceptual counterpoint: on one side, the composure and architectural solidity of historical painting; on the other, mobility, fragmentation, and the mutability of contemporary perception. The exhibition poses a fertile, provocative confrontation in which the artist interrogates the relationship between memory and oblivion, permanence and transience, stability and chaos. It invites the public to recognize in this tension the very essence of our time. Costanzo’s practice advances a strategy of reclaiming the visual waste produced by the global information circuit—images, slogans, pixels, codes, and discarded materials—recycling them with a constructive spirit and offering them a second life in the realm of artistic creation. In this act, reuse becomes both a poetic and political gesture, turning the noise of information into language, dispersion into vision, excess into meaning.
By freely juxtaposing diverse languages, techniques, and media, Costanzo constructs a contemporary kaleidoscope—an unstable archive of images and fragments that distills the condition of a “transparent society,” where, paradoxically, truth becomes ever harder to distinguish from its representation. CTRL+Z thus invites a critical and lyrical rereading of reality, offering viewers a perceptual and visual awareness suspended between irony and clarity.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a bilingual catalog published by Vydia, recounting Costanzo’s artistic research through the critic Paola Ballesi’s perspective, in a essay titled CTRL+Z; it includes an interview-dialogue between art historian Maria Letizia Paiato and the artist. In addition to the catalog, a video presented in the show captures the artist’s studio practice, research, and methods.
The Pannaggi project was made possible thanks to the lead sponsorship of Simonelli Group, a long-standing supporter of the synthesis between art and industry in the Marche region, and in collaboration with the Centro Studi Pannaggi, the Accademia dei Catenati, and Il Mugellini Festival, in partnership with Cesma (Centro Studi Marche), TOMAV – Torre di Moresco Centro Arti Visive, galleries Bianco Contemporaneo, Laboratorio 41, and Spazio Lavì.
Photo credits: Belong to Palazzo Buonaccorsi
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