Flaminia Lizzani | Begoña Zubero: Nel paesaggio

› Curated by Ludovico Pratesi

“It is within us that landscapes have a landscape”: this quote by Fernando Pessoa aptly encapsulates the profound essence of the exhibition, which is built around a visual dialogue between two artists working with photography. Their perspectives, though rooted in different cultural backgrounds, reflect complementary characters and sensibilities. What they share—through an ambiguous use of photography—is a vision of landscapes suspended in time, places laden with memory and history, uninhabited yet rich with presence, prompting deep contemplation from the viewer.

The works of Flaminia Lizzani (Rome, 1963) are intimate fragments, notes of landscapes seemingly anonymous but actually placed in dialogue with the great history of art, from Turner’s mottled skies to Monet’s exuberant and festive nature. Images captured by the artist at different times and places between the streets of Rome – his city – to the coasts and forests of Lazio, and carefully chosen according to private and solitary trajectories, maps of memory that eschew the temptations of an easy and banal beauty. The apparent banality of the selected views and vistas is transformed through a skillful use of light-derived from his solid film culture-and charges them with a delicate, suffused intensity. Dramatic in chiaroscuro tones are the black and white shots of urban views of a peripheral and always empty Rome, where the sharp shapes of anonymous architecture stand out against skies illuminated by lightning and storm flashes. Images suspended in an abstract time, metaphysical and almost unreal spaces in their mysterious “abstance. ”

“Working on landscape as an inner space allows me to amplify the ambiguity between photography and painting, delving into themes such as perception, reality and illusion. Using mixed techniques – camera, cell phone and different types of pictorial papers in the printing phase – I love to question the traditional boundaries between these art forms by creating works that defy classification.” (F. Lizzani).

The lens of Begoña Zubero (Bilbao, 1962) is bold, exploratory, anthropological, capable of crossing the boundaries of the permissible to cross the thresholds of territories often made incandescent and dangerous by conflicts and sociopolitical tensions. In 2018 he spent two months in Iraq for the M/D(Mosul Demolición) project, which resulted in a cycle of images called NEEEV – It’s not exotic, it’s vital 2020: his gaze captured images and details of bombed buildings, imposing urban ruins, glimpses of torn memories. ” NEEEV is not a purely documentary project, although in part it is firmly based on this register; it is also not photojournalism, although I had never worked with material so close to conflict zones. This work is meant to be a plastic interpretation of a reality of which we receive, constantly, endless information, but which is in fact shrouded in constant distortion. A kaleidoscope, from wide-angle to telephoto, to bring the viewer closer to the feeling of uncertainty and dualism of a present enveloped in a perverse historical repetition.” , emphasizes the Basque artist.

His shots, far from the pornography of tragedy – through the soft use of color and out-of-focus – transport us to a dimension of suavity and beauty, an omen of reconstruction and hope. Landscape for Zubero-understood as a territory of identity and memory-is also the architecture of Tempelhof, the Berlin airport station, the square Colosseum at Eur in Rome, the buildings of the Auschwitz concentration camps, the Lubyanka Palace in Moscow: the architecture of “power” in 20th-century Europe.