Within the vision of Acquasanta Edizioni, the collaboration with Italian-Argentinian artist Mariano Franzetti gives shape to “Smash”, a brutalist ping pong table featuring a top crafted from bookmatched Breccia Medicea dell’Acquasanta, suspended between functional object and symbolic narrative.

Franzetti’s intervention introduces his Tricky characters: hybrid, ironic and unsettling presences suspended between caricature and the “ugly but cool” archetype. Figures that appear playful and seductive at first glance, yet reveal a more contradictory and uneasy dimension beneath the surface — becoming a metaphor for contemporary identity, where appearance increasingly overrides authenticity.

Across the stone surface, the Tricky become active signs: interrupting the neutrality of the object, crossing it and contaminating it. The table is no longer simply a playful device, but a symbolic territory where the act of play overlaps with the construction of meaning.

The absolute and unrepeatable value of Breccia Medicea dell’Acquasanta thus enters into friction with a contemporary reality in which values appear increasingly unstable and appearance tends to replace substance.

Within this tension, the Tricky observe the viewer with subtle irony, engaging and disarming them at the same time. The game becomes language, and language becomes a mirror: an open match in which certainty no longer exists, only points of view.