"There in that slice of loamy, flat land that lies between the river and the mountain, between the Po and the Apennines.", just as Guareschi says, there in the Lowlands is where these photographic images are set, the ones that Paolo Simonazzi presents at Romberg Arte Contemporanea in Latina on the occasion of his exhibition "The Earth, Emilia, the Moon", curated by Gaia Conti. The exhibition, which opens on Saturday 15 February 2020, is part of the "Identity Cards" exhibition created by the gallery owner Italo Bergantini and the critic Gianluca Marziani.
Inside the gallery spaces, a selection of shots that is in all respects a sum of both a choral and captioned work in the most consistent acceptable meaning of the term: a visual cross-section of a world doubly linked to the past, which preserves clear signs and faded memories of it. A large fresco, that of Simonazzi, which embraces an arch of time spanning several years and which captures gestures and atmospheres, immortalizing them within the photographic frame. The people from Emilia, simple people with apparently somewhat hasty ways, are recounted in their human and cultural complexity by referring to the places, the squares, the arcades, the houses, the crafts, the walls, the landscapes.
The title of the exhibition is freely inspired by a song from a few years ago from the musical project of the singer-songwriter Vasco Brondi - The lights of the power station - born in Ferrara in 2007. In short, we can breathe in a lot of Emilia. All the charm of a land protected by fog and frost in winter and invaded by lacklustre heat in summer; the Emilian province, its dilated times and rhythms, its mixture of cultures and traditions which distance many kilometres from each other. They are places lost in anonymity, but full of identity, ambiguous, in some ways, but open to multiple interpretations, and damnably true.
Like small forays into the overall story Bell'Italia, Cose Ritrovate, Mondo Piccolo, Tra la via Emilia e il West, So near so far, Circo Bidone, they wind their way through space in a linear and elegant journey consisting of four images for each series. The accent becomes acute and the set up is different in the case of the Icons of Liscio, which, with their magnetic sense of kitsch, earn an entire wall on which to describe in detail the musical paradigm of the small ancient world that winks curiously at an artistic dimension that has been reconquered.
To end the journey, a work that is linked to Emilia by a common thread of real life: Mantua Cuba, an incursion, with three photographic cameos, in the small Caribbean town of Mantua founded, according to oral tradition, by a group of Italian sailors who reconstructed the memory of their homeland there.
Each sequence, with its peculiarity, manages to outline with extreme precision an unusual facet thanks to an acumen that is not easily found in many photographic works. Italy is recounted in the reflection of its province, an authentic vision, originated by its most intimate self, a fraternal eye that focuses on the sentimental centrality of spaces. A genre of photography that investigates reality by going beyond mere news and by paying great attention to the scene, the atmosphere, the soul that reveals itself with a sly, relaxed rhythm.
Paolo's narrative space is the result of a combination of concrete elements with which he builds the path of personal reminiscence, a testimony that is defined by the thickening of the fog between the vines of the Lowlands. The frame of the story is the story itself, a fresh and melancholy testimony that at the same time penetrates into the depths of the experience and the traditions of his land.
Looking at these shots I hear an evocative, suggestive and almost mystical ballad rise up "between a church, a castle and a dirt road" - citing the lyrics of the song that guided us for the exhibition - an underground rhythmic that disturbs the stars ... and the moon, as you know, gives us strange dreams.