Guido Guidi: Per Strada
12 Oct—21 Dec 2018Per Strada is an exhibition of 27 prints by the Italian photographer Guido Guidi, to coincide with the publication of a three-volume book of the same name published by MACK. This is Guidi’s fourth solo exhibition with Large Glass.
Per Strada brings together photographs taken by Guidi from 1980 to 1994 along the Via Emilia, an ancient Italian road connecting Milan with the Adriatic Sea, which passes close to Guidi's home. To this day, the Via Emilia is the territorial backbone of the Southern tier of the Po Valley, running through mid-size cities such as Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna, Forlì, and Rimini. Using an 8x10 inch camera, Guidi directs his lens towards the ‘interstices’ between cities rather than on historical centres. His book charts a rich palimpsest of signs in the landscape built from centuries of residential, agricultural, industrial, and commercial activity. As Guidi has commented in an accompanying interview:
‘It is a way of bowing down before things. And that is the religious aspect, a respect for things, for the blade of grass and wanting to give back by means of a precise photograph, where the execution of the detail is perfect, absolute, with no grain. The photograph must be absolute, transparent and cannot be corrected and reviewed later. As Didi-Huberman says, for the ancient painters of the 1400s, the act of imitagere or copying nature was in itself an act of devotion. Not necessarily mastery or technical virtuosity but an act of devotion towards things, the “things which are nothing” as Pasolini says.’
Per Strada brings together photographs taken by Guidi from 1980 to 1994 along the Via Emilia, an ancient Italian road connecting Milan with the Adriatic Sea, which passes close to Guidi's home. To this day, the Via Emilia is the territorial backbone of the Southern tier of the Po Valley, running through mid-size cities such as Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna, Forlì, and Rimini. Using an 8x10 inch camera, Guidi directs his lens towards the ‘interstices’ between cities rather than on historical centres. His book charts a rich palimpsest of signs in the landscape built from centuries of residential, agricultural, industrial, and commercial activity. As Guidi has commented in an accompanying interview:
‘It is a way of bowing down before things. And that is the religious aspect, a respect for things, for the blade of grass and wanting to give back by means of a precise photograph, where the execution of the detail is perfect, absolute, with no grain. The photograph must be absolute, transparent and cannot be corrected and reviewed later. As Didi-Huberman says, for the ancient painters of the 1400s, the act of imitagere or copying nature was in itself an act of devotion. Not necessarily mastery or technical virtuosity but an act of devotion towards things, the “things which are nothing” as Pasolini says.’