NO EXCUSE
Désirée Nakouzi De Monte & Andrea Parenti of Collezione Nancy Delroi
13 October, 2026 - 17 Janauary, 2027
DES BAINS presents NO EXCUSE, a solo exhibition by the Italo-Lebanese duo Désirée Nakouzi De Monte and Andrea Parenti. Nakouzi and Parenti have worked together since 2014, first as co-directors of MRZB Art Group, active between Amsterdam and Turin, and since 2024 through Collezione Nancy Delroi, with which they work between Milan and Beirut. Their practice moves between sculpture, installation, film, furniture, image-making and staged environments, and is marked by a sustained interest in objects that have already accumulated a history before arriving in the work.
NO EXCUSE is a social satire on our incapacity to confront the obvious meaning behind unequivocal events. As images of violence are endlessly repeated, empathy gives way to familiarity: horror becomes sex, catastrophe becomes content, and evil, through repetition, becomes banal, consumed on a carousel of spectacle like advertising slogans, where everything is made visible and nothing is truly seen. The aesthetics of collapse take centre stage, and the work questions the radical trauma of aesthetics, performativity and desire, a desire never fully satisfied. The new works take up questions of violence, fame, surveillance, beauty and cult images. The exhibition brings together a selection of new works and films. Among them are tables bearing assemblages and mise-en-scènes populated by eccentric characters. In NO EXCUSE (2026), an antique-style doll in a red dress and pink beret stands beside a painted fox in orange and pink, set on a dark base. In a further sculpture, also titled NO EXCUSE (2026), a row of small dolls with open heads is aligned along a painted plank, the foremost bearing a sickle.
On the walls, works combine painted timber, found wood panels, nails, upholstery studs and found papers with chromogenic prints, some set in late nineteenth-century Guilloché frames. In one, a cowhide and a zebra-patterned hide on a white panel are crossed by battens in red, pink, white and blue. In another, a red-toned photographic image sits within brushed pink paint and a cyan edge, with battens in red and yellow standing proud of the surface. Films presented on a 28-inch Hantarex monitor include You Kill Me Second (March 2025, 29 min 57 sec), performed by Alana Ungaro, Anna and Pietro Agostoni, and Dialoghi & Repliche (2025, 16 min), with an original screenplay written and performed by J.T. LeRoy and Rebecca Isabel Consolandi, enacted by Aldo Filardo and Désirée Nakouzi De Monte. The films belong to a long-term project begun in 2025, developed in episodes and scenes with the actors who perform in them.
NO EXCUSE is a social satire on our incapacity to confront the obvious meaning behind unequivocal events. As images of violence are endlessly repeated, empathy gives way to familiarity: horror becomes sex, catastrophe becomes content, and evil, through repetition, becomes banal, consumed on a carousel of spectacle like advertising slogans, where everything is made visible and nothing is truly seen. The aesthetics of collapse take centre stage, and the work questions the radical trauma of aesthetics, performativity and desire, a desire never fully satisfied. The new works take up questions of violence, fame, surveillance, beauty and cult images. The exhibition brings together a selection of new works and films. Among them are tables bearing assemblages and mise-en-scènes populated by eccentric characters. In NO EXCUSE (2026), an antique-style doll in a red dress and pink beret stands beside a painted fox in orange and pink, set on a dark base. In a further sculpture, also titled NO EXCUSE (2026), a row of small dolls with open heads is aligned along a painted plank, the foremost bearing a sickle.
On the walls, works combine painted timber, found wood panels, nails, upholstery studs and found papers with chromogenic prints, some set in late nineteenth-century Guilloché frames. In one, a cowhide and a zebra-patterned hide on a white panel are crossed by battens in red, pink, white and blue. In another, a red-toned photographic image sits within brushed pink paint and a cyan edge, with battens in red and yellow standing proud of the surface. Films presented on a 28-inch Hantarex monitor include You Kill Me Second (March 2025, 29 min 57 sec), performed by Alana Ungaro, Anna and Pietro Agostoni, and Dialoghi & Repliche (2025, 16 min), with an original screenplay written and performed by J.T. LeRoy and Rebecca Isabel Consolandi, enacted by Aldo Filardo and Désirée Nakouzi De Monte. The films belong to a long-term project begun in 2025, developed in episodes and scenes with the actors who perform in them.
Some materials have appeared in earlier films and installations; others originate in domestic environments or have been adapted from existing objects. Elements initially conceived for a set are reworked and presented as autonomous pieces. The exhibition can be considered in relation to a wider history of artists working across objects, constructed environments and moving images. In Mike Kelley's Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene) (2000), a photograph of a school play becomes the starting point for a staged film and an installation incorporating its domestic set. Isa Genzken's Fuck the Bauhaus: New Buildings for New York (2000) brings together architectural forms and everyday materials in precarious assemblages. Paul Thek's The Procession / The Artist's Co-op (1969) combines figures, objects and constructed environments in an installation shaped by collective production and continual reconfiguration.
Gino De Dominicis's Il tempo, lo sbaglio, lo spazio (1969) and Fabio Mauri's Intellettuale (1975, that includes Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il Vangelo secondo Matteo) offer further historical contexts for considering the relationships between figure, object, image and the apparatus through which images are produced. In the first, a human skeleton and the skeleton of a dog are brought together in an absurd, suspended encounter; in the second, the projection of a film onto a human body is the central event of the work.
In NO EXCUSE, the different stages of making and presenting an image remain in view. Film, furniture, props and sculptural elements occupy the same space without being reduced to a single medium or narrative.
Gino De Dominicis's Il tempo, lo sbaglio, lo spazio (1969) and Fabio Mauri's Intellettuale (1975, that includes Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il Vangelo secondo Matteo) offer further historical contexts for considering the relationships between figure, object, image and the apparatus through which images are produced. In the first, a human skeleton and the skeleton of a dog are brought together in an absurd, suspended encounter; in the second, the projection of a film onto a human body is the central event of the work.
In NO EXCUSE, the different stages of making and presenting an image remain in view. Film, furniture, props and sculptural elements occupy the same space without being reduced to a single medium or narrative.
Text by Maria Valeria Biondo
Collezione Nancy Delroi
Désirée Nakouzi De Monte (b. 1994, Trieste, IT)
Andrea Parenti (b. 1992, Milano, IT)
Collezione Nancy Delroi’s practice articulates its language through the détournement o clichés and the tensions of performative community, built on the edge of the rupture of contemporary society. Grimy collages made from dismantled sofas reconfigure the authority of the Old Master in the trauma and obsolescence of domestic residue; A misé-en-scene—furnitur fragments, emptied middle-class symbols—assembled into pathetic yet deliberate compositions, aiming to evoke new cult-like imaginary by reshaping the dominant narrative. Collezione Nancy Delroi is also conceived as a House-Gallery and Officina. Founded in 2024, located in Viale Bligny—Milan. Directed by Nakouzi and Parenti. The presentations aim to explore new formats — through open-ended creation, formalization, friction, including a variety of exhibitions, events, and situations, shaped through self-organized programmes — functioning as experimental frameworks.
Recent presentations include Vulcana. Sublimation, Stromboli (2026); Kunstverein in Hamburg (2026); Galerie Hussenot, Paris (2026); and a solo presentation with DES BAINS at Miart, Milan (2026). Previous projects developed under MRZB include exhibitions at Manifattura Tabacchi, Florence; Conservatoire Pierre Barbizet, Marseille; De Ateliers, Amsterdam; MACAO, Milan; and Associazione Barriera, Turin. Their work has been supported by Culture Moves Europe and the Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, and they were shortlisted for the MAXXI BVLGARI Prize and recipients of the Torino Social Impact Art Award / Artissima.
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