On Friday 16 May at 6 pm, Accidental Landscapes opens at Galleria Studio Cenacchi, Via Santo Stefano 63, Bologna. Curated by Pasquale Fameli, the exhibition presents a different artist and medium on each of the gallery’s three levels.

Zeno Bertozzi, Augusto Gadea and Luca Mantovani explore different ways of approaching and rethinking the landscape.

Pasquale Fameli writes in the critical text accompanying the exhibition:

“Conventionally, a landscape is created through the two-dimensional representation of a real or imagined environment. Yet the ways in which space has been represented have changed radically over time. Beginning with the abandonment of linear perspective, the visual arts have introduced new ways of understanding landscape. The panorama, with its broad and detailed view of a territory, has given way to an anti-model: an uncertain, fragmented vision that draws attention to the very act of seeing. The works of Zeno Bertozzi, Augusto Gadea and Luca Mantovani offer three distinct expressions of the instability, fragmentation and multiplicity that define landscape today.”

Zeno Bertozzi’s latest works are part of his deeply personal exploration of the relentless passage of time. Here, his attention turns to a silent, inert and motionless landscape, created through the painstaking manipulation of plaster with a range of tools. What emerges is the suggestion of unfamiliar landscapes: delicate textures and rarefied atmospheres.

Over the past decade, Augusto Gadea has developed a painterly language centred on the earth itself. For Gadea, landscape becomes a field of imaginative possibilities arising from direct contact with the materials beneath our feet. He explores the evocative power of earth as a bearer of both time and symbolic meaning, bringing imagination together with the physical practice of working with materials he gathers himself. In these paintings, earth is shifted from the horizontal plane to the vertical, shaping an image of the world that becomes a vision of landscape.

Luca Mantovani’s New Epic is a visual narrative inspired by the idea of the journey. The work draws on Italian Eclogues, one of Anglo-Caribbean poet Derek Walcott’s most significant reflections on the Italian landscape. Walcott recounts his travels beyond Mantua and onwards to Venice, weaving the Italian landscape into memories of his friend, the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, and some of the most important figures of classical literature.