The spirit of 16th-century Italy is coming to New York this Spring. On view now through June 12 at StudioTwentySeven New York, curators Nacho Polo and Robert Onuska present Tessuto, Francesco Balzano’s solo exhibition and collectible furniture collection. Comprising works conceived during his one-month residency at the historic Villa Medici in Rome in 2025, the pieces are shaped by time, place, and the layered cultural histories embedded in the villa itself.
At its core, Tessuto is a meditation on heritage and continuity: a tribute to the intertwined histories of Italian and French architecture, design, and craftsmanship that define both Villa Medici and Balzano’s own personal lineage. For Balzano, the residency marked a profound shift. “There was a before and after my time at Villa Medici,” he reflects. “It was an aesthetic shock to my system.” During weeks of solitude, walking the gardens and photographing the villa’s façades and surrounding landscape, Balzano developed a process that abstracted architecture and nature into compositional ideas that later re-emerged as furniture. In this sense, Tessuto can be read as a series of distilled images: objects that quietly hold memory, atmosphere, and proportion.
The exhibition will feature five select designs from Balzano’s larger Tessuto collection, each produced in a strictly limited edition of 12. White lacquered wooden structures form the architectural skeleton of the collection, their clean lines softened and animated by historic jacquard toile fabrics from Rubelli.
Selected collaboratively during Balzano’s residency, the fabric palette — light green, pale pink, and soft yellow — draws directly from the chromatic atmosphere of Villa Medici. Green evokes the formal Italian gardens and the wilder forest beyond; pink recalls the interior decorative traditions of Rome; yellow reflects the sunlit stone architecture of the villa itself. Rendered in derby toile, a richly textured jacquard inspired by French toile de jouy, the fabrics embody the cultural interchange at the heart of the project: French heritage woven through Italian craftsmanship.
In Tessuto, architecture, landscape, and material culture converge in a restrained and enduring body of work that transforms spatial experience and historical memory into furniture of lasting presence, reflecting the commitment Balzano shares with StudioTwentySeven to architecturally grounded, historically informed, and forward-looking collectible design.
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