Saturday 13 January 2024 at 5 pm

Two venues in Bologna:
– Galleria Studio Cenacchi, Via Santo Stefano 63
– Studio Iusgate, Via Castiglione 81

Periplo siciliano, a solo exhibition of photographs by Marco Rigamonti, opens simultaneously across the two venues. Curated by Jacopo Cenacchi, this is Rigamonti’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and the first presentation in Bologna of his photographic exploration of Sicily, following its successful showing at MIA Fair in Milan in March 2023.

The exhibition comprises 30 works, including ten photographs that have never previously been printed.

Born in Piacenza, in northern Italy’s Po Valley, Rigamonti has a deep attachment to Sicily, where he has spent many of his summer holidays. His camera turns away from the island’s familiar subjects and seeks out a different visual language, far removed from conventional representations. His photographs convey not only his affection for Sicily, but also a clear-eyed awareness of what Gaetano Savatteri calls its ‘ruins of the contemporary’.

Savatteri writes in his introduction to the book Periplo siciliano, published by Postcart:

“Sicily asserts itself not only through the weight of its presence, but through the stories it tells about itself. It does so in literature, cinema and theatre. And it does so through the photographer’s eye. Marco Rigamonti has chosen to move away from familiar representations of the island. His Sicily is shaped above all by the marks of the contemporary world. […] He travelled across the island in search of monuments that were not silent ghosts of the past, but structures built by us, in our own time. Ruins of the present. Remains of the contemporary. An extreme landscape where contrast exists entirely within the scene itself, interrupted only by the glare of light as it cuts through the shadows and dissolves them.”

Across the works shown at the two venues, the dazzling intensity of the Sicilian summer light is immediately palpable. Look more closely, however, and another quality emerges: Rigamonti’s profound empathy for the island and all its contradictions. It is here that the sensitivity and distinctive poetry of his photographic vision come most clearly into focus.