Domenico Bianchi is a secular alchemist. His research is conceptual, anchored to tutelary forefathers, all of them Italian: Gino De Dominicis, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz. He is especially indebted to Alighiero Boetti, from whom he has absorbed the ability to work within a given set of rules. When Bianchi started out in the Roman milieu of the early 1980s, the most pronounced trait of that post-Transavanguardia generation was what he calls “arrogance,” an excessive and bombastic attitude related to their reliance on certain colors, forms, and gestures. Bianchi takes inspiration from elsewhere—from