On 12 January at 6 pm, Tutto il silenzio che c’era, a photography exhibition by Marco Rigamonti, opens at Studio Cenacchi, Via Santo Stefano 63, Bologna. Critical text by Gigliola Foschi.

Images emerge like returning memories, like persistent shadows. Memories of tangled woods as dark as the recesses of the soul, of sea horizons stretching towards unspeakable infinities, of sorrowful flowers and delicate forms of plant life.

With these new series, Rigamonti shows that photography is not confined to the moment when the shutter is released: it can become a suspension, a drifting through time. A journey into the past and into photography itself. His works are, in fact, images of images. He delves into his own photographic archive, embarking, without ever leaving his studio, on a kind of journey through files and containers. He retrieves series of slides taken in the analogue era, prints them onto 20 × 25 Polaroid — itself an obsolete, ageing material — and transfers them onto watercolour paper (Solo fiori); or he duplicates them, again using Polaroid, and leaves them to soak in balsamic vinegar for 24 hours, as in Paesaggi acidi. The result is a series of atmospheric, blurred images, sometimes soft, sometimes scarred by mysterious corrosions.

It is as though Rigamonti were carrying out a kind of photographic ‘verification’ — not analytical, as in the work of Ugo Mulas, but poetic: an attempt to bring to the surface the latent images that have settled among his photographs, revealing what remains despite everything, despite the vinegar that attacks them and stains them brown. The clarity of the original images gives way to works freed from the task of depicting a view or recording a landscape. They become, as it were, ‘veiled’ images: losing definition while gaining another kind of vision, one belonging to the inner world and the imagination. Their veil re-veals them, turning them into small apparitions suspended in an undefined time, unfolding like a premonition, like a memory.

In Paesaggi acidi, the sea becomes an expanse of the inner self and the horizon the very essence of distance: the point where seeing encounters not-seeing, the line where the visible touches the invisible.

In the Perso nel bosco series, Rigamonti’s dark images make us feel the tangle of branches that seem almost to brush against our faces and reach towards us. Here, the remoteness of the horizon is reversed into an overwhelming closeness. Any rational, controlling view becomes impossible because we are quite literally lost in the woods, and seeing is transformed into an experience of feeling: something unstable and pervasive, escaping conscious thought and shifting with the movements of a body walking as though lost among undergrowth and meadows battered by the cold. With their discontinuous, non-linear logic, these shadowy, fluctuating and disorienting images unsettle our sense of time and our position in space. Photography becomes the sensitive record of an experience within nature rather than in front of it.

Suspended between appearance and disappearance, preservation and dissolution, are the images of the new Solo fiori series, devoted to small bunches of flowers discarded in cemetery bins. These flowers are no longer depicted between blossoming and decay, between chromatic abundance and disintegration, as they were by seventeenth-century vanitas painters seeking to evoke human mortality as well as the allure and fragility of beauty.

Instead, Rigamonti gives us only withered flowers, petals and corollas thrown away. Yet even as remnants, they remain traces of an act of affection connecting the living with those who are gone. Rather than metaphors for birth and death, they are persistent memories, still alive, still among the living.

Rigamonti rescues these memories and shows them almost exactly as he found them, without retreating into allegory or the picturesque. And it is precisely this that makes them beautiful and melancholy, permeated by a vibrant sense of contemplation.