Lovett/Codagnone “I Only Want You to Love Me” PAC / Milano

Lovett/Codagnone, I Only Want You to Love Me, 4 July – 14 September 2025, PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy, curated by Diego Sileo

“Love is a minefield: you walk in dancing, hoping not to blow up.”
That was the thought that struck us as we stepped into the PAC that afternoon, confronted by the first black mirrored surfaces of Love Vigilantes. More than any other room, that one pulsed with the heavy silence of an absence: Alessandro Codagnone, one half of the Lovett/Codagnone duo, no longer present. And yet, this exhibition does not sound like a eulogy. It’s something else entirely, a persistent evocation, an invitation to step back into a conversation that’s uncomfortable but essential. Where love is a threat in disguise, and fragility flickers like a screaming neon sign. What remains of desire when it’s laid bare before public judgment? What becomes of the queer body when placed at the center of institutional gaze, between wire fences and polished photography? I Only Want You to Love Me sounds like a sweet ultimatum, but with every step through the show, it becomes clearer: love here is a battlefield.

The PAC is stripped down to something close to a stark theatre. Each room unfolds like a distinct act, each transition feels like crossing an emotional threshold. Darkness converses with silence; the installations don’t scream, they restrain, like voices trained in secrecy. Visitors move slowly, almost reverently, as though wandering through a profane chapel. Sounds, often abrasive, seep in from unseen spaces. The works are arranged less by theme than by tension; they clash, contradict, confront each other like witnesses in a trial. Within this montage of dissonance, Lovett/Codagnone construct a grammar of emotional dissent. Photography, video, sculpture, performance, the duo’s mediums don’t follow one another; they overlay, like layers in an emotional edit. Stripped, the all-black American flag, devoid of stars and stripes, reads as a mute scream heavier than any chant. Truth Is Born of the Times, not of Authority, which requires viewers to pass through a metal barrier, imposes a political gesture before an aesthetic one. Here, materials, steel, neon, fabric, flesh, are never neutral. They carry urgency, always unruly.

Sound becomes substance in Death Disko: Last Dance, where the obsessive loop of Donna Summer’s Last Dance becomes a melancholic requiem for an era that once felt untouchable. And bodies become mediums too, in the After Roxy series: nude, non-normative embraces suggest a post-identitarian intimacy, fragile yet fierce. The images don’t seduce, they confront. The objects don’t decorate, they disrupt. Lovett/Codagnone have never sought harmony. They work through friction, rupture, and the unsaid. This tension resurfaces in Perfect Day, where Lou Reed’s falsely pacified sweetness scores the slow, brutal act of a snake swallowing a rat. Biology and politics collapse into one another, reminding us that love, like power, can kill. Or save. It depends which end of the knife you hold in your teeth. And that knife, precariously balanced between the mouths of the two artists in For You, becomes a central metaphor: shared gesture, mutual risk, tenderness that cuts.

And it’s the glowing wound of I Only Want You to Love Me, that trembling neon plea, that encapsulates everything we’ve seen. In that flickering persistence, the entire poetics of the duo converge: love as exposure, dissidence as caress, desire as shared language. Nothing in this show seeks to soothe. Instead, it leaves us pulsing with questions, pierced by intimacy, disoriented by beauty. This is a show to walk through holding your breath, eyes wide open, heart, if you dare, undefended.