Poised between appearance and disappearance, preservation and dissolution, the images in the new series Solo fiori focus on the small bunches of flowers discarded in cemetery bins.

These are not flowers caught between bloom and decay, between the richness of colour and the onset of decomposition, as in seventeenth-century vanitas painting, where flowers served as reminders of human mortality as well as the beauty and fragility of life. Rigamonti shows us only what remains: wilted flowers, fallen petals and discarded blooms.

Yet even in this state, they retain the trace of an act of affection, a gesture connecting the living with those who are gone. Rather than metaphors for life and death, they become enduring memories — still present, still among the living.

Rigamonti rescues these fragments and presents them much as he found them, without turning them into allegory or picturesque imagery. It is precisely this restraint that gives the photographs their beauty: melancholy, quiet and deeply contemplative.

Polaroid 20 × 25 transfer on watercolour paper
Unique work
50 × 40 cm, 2006
€1,300

The series is also available as prints on Photo Canvas 320 in the following sizes (edition of 5 + 2 artist’s proofs):

70 × 100 cm — €750
50 × 70 cm — €500