To flip over and reveal: an apparently simple and innocuous operation that can nonetheless trigger new and unprecedented readings in a field already inherently mutable and effervescent, such as that of contemporary art. With this in mind, the new exhibition entitled "Recto Verso", recently inaugurated at the North Gallery of the Fondazione Prada in Milan and running until 14 February 2016, sets out precisely to focus attention on the habitually hidden elements of the artistic object — that is, on the "reverse" or back of it (the so-called "verso"), commonly kept from the viewer's gaze, or considered of secondary importance in relation to the frontal or "public" side (the "recto") of the work.

This overturning can be more or less intentionally carried out by the artists themselves, in different ways and with different aims: examples range from certain trompe-l'oeil works of eighteenth-century Flemish painting to the use of the back of a canvas as a vehicle for political messaging, as in the case of Gastone Novelli's protest at the Venice Biennale during the 1968 movement, or that of Michelangelo Pistoletto, who in "Un libro, il lato letterario del quadro" (1970, see cover photograph) draws from the B-side of the stretcher frame a broad and anomalous writing surface.

Manipulating the "recto" and the "verso" can also very often bring about a genuine overturning of hierarchies, as in the case of the three triangular canvases by Giulio Paolini ("La decima musa", 1966), in which the work becomes visible only when viewed the wrong way round — that is, by inverting the habitual point of view. Front and back then go so far as to overlap and mutually condense through that fusion of planes which characterises certain well-known works by Alberto Burri ("Plastica e combustione su cornice di alluminio", 1962).

On the basis of this guiding principle, the Fondazione Prada's new exhibition — developed, like many of its predecessors, through the original formula of collective curatorship entrusted to the so-called "Thought Council", a genuine curatorial task force composed of four foreign experts — proceeds by drawing, as is customary, on works from the permanent "indigenous" collection, then integrating them with loans from other galleries or museum institutions.

Paintings and photographs on display thus articulate, through a highly peculiar formula, the typically intellectualist and self-questioning vocation of contemporary art, which has always striven to investigate the innermost reasons for its own existence, the mysterious essence or the very legitimacy of its constitution as "art" — that is, the elusive emergence of its status among the thousand objects of the physical world. Bringing the back of the work to the foreground produces not only the effect of conferring three-dimensionality and new visual angles upon the ordinary two-dimensional depth of a painting or photograph, but also allows for the enactment of Derrida's well-known deconstructionist aspiration to "inhabit the margin as if it were a territory".