“The Analogue Mountain. Michelangelo Antonioni and Luigi Ghirri” exhibition

The Analogue Mountain is an exhibition conceived as an unfinished visual essay whose inconclusiveness, far from responding to an accident or an accidental circumstance, responds to the desire to explore the artistic practice of Michelangelo Antonioni (Ferrara, 1912 - Rome, 2007) and Luigi Ghirri (Scandiano, 1943 - Roncocesi, 1992) based on the infinite affinities that exist between the cinematographic production of one and the photographic production of the other. This catalogue of analogies, approximations and common, serene and imperceptible gestures demonstrates the way in which both artists reflect on that part of our existence that goes beyond the gaze, that is expressed in silence and seeks to fill some of its gaps. A way of being and acting in the world of which this exhibition only shows the tip of an iceberg. Or the peak of a mountain. Or better still, the representation of the peak of the idea of a mountain.

Antonioni and Ghirri, born thirty-one years apart in two different cities in the same region of northern Italy, separated by a road of just over one hundred kilometres and mountains whose average height is no more than 500 metres, are two artists who, although they did not meet in life, forged their gazes in the plains, educated themselves about vision in large concentrations of floodplains and rivers, and outlined their conceptual and formal horizons by freely travelling through that foggy area through which thought and imagination pass.

Through a selection of no more than forty images belonging to Antonioni's Enchanted Mountains series, released in the sixties under his attentive gaze, and Ghirri's early work, during the seventies as part of his travels through the Po Valley looking for what was happening beyond a fleeting glance, this exhibition starts as a search that is conceived as an intuition, travels through the orography of a presentiment, embraces the idea of a mountain and shares what is perceived between the walls of the same space. It is a stop on the way to remaining, from there, in a situation of "desiring", always waiting for something.