In Babel, Murano glass becomes a “philosophical canvas” upon which the author incises a ruthless X-ray of the 21st century. A bicycle-riding Don Quixote, armed only with the shield of identity and shouting the famous Fantozzian invective in Latin, challenges social media alienation and the “fake.” The tower-windmill is the monster of our history: from Kepler’s Universe to the watershed of 9/11, every illusion collapses. A metaphysical work denouncing a chaos of languages subservient to a single message: consume!
In Babel, Murano glass becomes a “philosophical canvas” upon which the author incises a ruthless X-ray of the 21st century. A bicycle-riding Don Quixote challenges social media alienation and “fake” armed with the shield of identity and shouting the famous Fantozzian invective—in Latin. The tower-windmill is the monster of our history: from Kepler’s Universe to the watershed of 9/11, every illusion collapses. A metaphysical work denouncing a chaos of languages subservient to a single message: consume!
ANALYSIS
BABEL: the aesthetic and philosophical manifesto of Marco Toso Borella
The work Babel stands as the pinnacle of Marco Toso Borella’s technical and aesthetic maturity. As the iconic piece of the exhibition to which it gives its name, it is currently the largest work ever created by the Muranese artist. Through the use of his proprietary Murano Glass Gold Graffito 3D technique applied to a “flat” multilayer glass support, the artist performs a complex cultural operation: he recovers the millenary Venetian-Byzantine tradition of 24k pure gold leaf craftsmanship, ferrying it into the tensions, speeds, and contradictions of the contemporary world. The Muranese glass canvas, characterized by a vibrant texture of blue tiles evoking the great mosaics of St. Mark’s and Gothic stained glass, engages in a contrasting dialogue with the plastic layering of the gold. The golden surface loses any merely decorative function to become living matter, scratched with surgical precision. It is precisely through this incisive action that volumes, chiaroscuro, and narrative emerge, transforming the intrinsic fragility of glass into a solid and imposing visual monument.
Iconography: literary myth and historical trauma in the monster-tower
The work is dominated by a powerful vertical thrust. At the base lie symbols of historical and cultural stability and classical lagoon architecture, which are nevertheless progressively swallowed up by the monstrous evolution of the Tower of Babel, the biblical archetype of human pride, linguistic fragmentation, and incommunicability. In Toso Borella’s vision, this architectural structure undergoes a conceptual metamorphosis, merging with the iconography of Cervantes’ windmills. As the eye moves upward, the tower-windmill transforms into an anthropomorphic monster, an asymmetrical and geometric titan with multiple arms stretching outward. At the summit of this frightening structure, the tower culminates in the terrifying figuration of Dante’s Lucifer with his three heads, whose screaming faces recall the expressive anguish of the Baroque, metaphysical sculpture, and early 20th-century Expressionist cinema. As in the final canto of the Inferno in the Divine Comedy, where the king of hell is trapped in ice and represents the unmoved mover of evil and the total absence of communication, here the three-headed Lucifer becomes the nerve center of contemporary Babel: three overlapping faces screaming into the void, symbolizing the inverted trinity of the algorithm, technocracy, and commodification. This ascent visually represents the central thesis of the exhibition: the transition from humanistic civilization to the new hyper-technological and alienating Babel of the 21st century.
The apocalyptic summit: the Twin Towers, the Cross, and Kepler’s universe
The reflection on the collapse of languages and the fragility of civilizations intensifies in the upper part of the work, where the verticality of Babel—presided over by the frightening Dantean triad—is joined by an explicit and dramatic reference to recent history: the Twin Towers in flames. The evocation of the collective trauma of September 11th becomes here the geopolitical and philosophical symbol of the end of an era. In this dramatic scenario, the silhouette of a plane in flight is transformed into a cross, creating a profound visual short-circuit in which the instrument of technological destruction overlaps with the millenary symbol of martyrdom, sacrifice, and faith. Immediately below this dramatic intersection, embedded right between the two wounded towers, the artist inserts a refined and rigorous celestial geometry: the geometric-astronomical structure of Kepler’s Universe. This cosmological diagram, based on Platonic solids and the search for universal harmony (Mysterium Cosmographicum), is here violently torn apart by fire and the fault line of modern history. By positioning the perfect order of the Keplerian universe under the sign of the plane-cross, Toso Borella stages the ultimate short-circuit: the human claim to harness the cosmos in perfect mathematical harmony collapses in the face of the intrusion of chaos, conflict, and global misunderstanding, transforming the top of the painting into a complex meditation on the fate and fragility of scientific and spiritual thought.
The mask of the False: the denunciation of “Fake Glass”
Right at the center of the composition, embedded in the beating heart of the monster-tower and immediately beneath the dominion of the Luciferian heads, a crucial element emerges: a disturbing mask branded with the words “fake glass”. This detail is not merely a piece of the global allegorical narrative, but constitutes the core of a precise and militant poetic declaration. Marco Toso Borella, a tireless defender of the authenticity of Murano Glass, uses the golden canvas to launch a frontal attack against the counterfeiting that threatens his island. The “fake glass” mask represents commercial deception, the loss of identity, and the speculation that strips the centuries-old tradition of its meaning, reducing it to a mass-produced imported souvenir. Placing this denunciation at the center of the Babel totem means equating artistic falsification with the Dantean corruption of languages: in a world that has lost the ability to communicate and recognize the truth, “fake glass” becomes the perfect symbol of contemporary alienation, which the artist strikes out against with institutional and ethical firmness.
The lone hero: Don Quixote of La Mancha
“It is not a windmill!”, the man in the foreground seems to shout: Don Quixote of La Mancha, the archetype of the idealist mistaken for a madman. Here, the artist performs a pop and desecrating operation: the knight is stripped of his historic steed Rocinante and transformed into a man of our time advancing on a rickety bicycle—an exquisitely human, “slow,” and analog means of transport compared to the digital speed of the monster he faces. In this context, Don Quixote does not fight against inner ghosts; he is the only character endowed with consciousness and lucidity, the only one capable of piercing the veil of Maya of collective illusions to see the real monstrosity of the present and the imposture of the central mask. Around him moves a crowd of grotesque and alienated figures—the clowns at the base of the structure—while a stream of emojis floats against the backdrop of a blue sky, mirrored like the tiles of an ancient mosaic.
The knight protects himself with a shield bearing the eagle, the heraldic coat of arms of the Toso family, historically identifiable by the characteristic inverted “A” positioned below the emblem. It is a claim to identity tradition, Muranese know-how, and historical memory as the only true immune defense against contemporary alienation and falsification: one’s own historical and artistic roots become protective armor.
The semiotic short-circuit: from Latin to Hotel California
The most disruptive stylistic feature lies on the scroll-sign placed on the knight’s lance, where the loftiness and solemnity of the Latin language are used to translate one of the greatest expressions of 20th-century Italian cinematic satire: Ugo Fantozzi’s famous invective against “The Battleship Kotiomkin.”
This desecrating insertion fits into the great artistic tradition of carnivalesque reversal and serves a dual critical function: The Demythologization of Artistic Language, breaking the academic rigidity and dusty sacredness commonly associated with the use of gold leaf and major museum institutions. The Denunciation of False Intellectualism, becoming a manifesto of rebellion against pre-established cultural dogmas, the manipulative languages of the algorithm, and the ideological “battleships” of mass society. Latin, the historical language of power, is used to unmask the rhetoric of Silicon Valley, defining social media and apps as empty superstructures, places without space and without time. A concept amplified by layered graphic citations recalling the famous Hotel California by the Eagles (also a cornerstone of the repertoire of the Big Vocal Orchestra directed by Toso Borella himself): a seemingly lovely place, populated by artificially smiling faces “who always say hello,” but from which it is impossible to escape. The contrast between the dominant gold (the color of the sacred) and the fragmented blue of the sky creates a very strong tension. The gold encloses the human figure and the tower, while the blue background recalls the cold light of the backlit screens of our smartphones. The sky is no longer the metaphysical infinite, but a digital background dotted with pop icons and disguised social logos, framing the work like the miniatures of a medieval codex updated to the Instagram format.
The anthropology of Consumption: the pop frame and Feuerbach
And it is precisely in the frame that a further and refined level of intellectual provocation takes place. If gold and glass ennoble the heart of the composition, the frame delimits its boundaries by sacralizing shamelessly profane elements of our consumerist daily life: global icons like Coca-Cola, Nutella, and even the provocative inclusion of a condom. Far from being a mere concession to Pop aesthetics, this device finds a deep philosophical root in the famous formula by Ludwig Feuerbach: “Man is what he eats” (“Der Mensch ist, was er ißt”). The artist performs a critical and ruthless transposition here: if in the 19th-century Feuerbachian sense the unity between mind and body was claimed to free man from theological abstractions, today Toso Borella shows us how that biological unity has been entirely colonized by the market. The contemporary human being has become what they consume, what they ingest, and what they abuse, both physically and digitally. The frame thus becomes the biological and cultural mirror of the new man of Babel: a hyper-connected being whose vital, affective, and even sexual functions are constantly mediated and branded. Placing these symbols of serial consumption in the frame—historically the place designated for decorum and the protection of the sacred—means overturning the very concept of “nourishment,” denouncing how contemporary society has reduced the complexity of the soul to a list of products on a shelf.
Glass as a “Philosophical Canvas”
Babel is a work of fierce relevance. It succeeds in the noblest intent of metaphysical art: using a technique with centuries of history to perform a ruthless X-ray of the present. Toso Borella does not limit himself to decorating glass; he uses it as a philosophical canvas on which he incises, with the precision of a surgeon and the irony of a satyr, the drama of modern incommunicability and the commodification of art.