Opening Saturday, 28 February at 5 p.m. at the Oratorio San Carlo in Via Testaferrata
Two masters of photography join forces to create an exhibition that is first and foremost a celebration of this art form as a means of connection: constant listening, a way of travelling the world in search of authenticity, capturing moments rich in meaning.
Francesco Nigi and Mario Lensi will exhibit images from two projects, respectively “Tagli di luce” (Cuts of Light) and “A Year in the Life”, which testify to how photography can document the most significant, never banal moments and recount them, arousing emotions, sensations and memories. The exhibition will be inaugurated at the Oratorio San Carlo in Via Testaferrata 34, Castelfiorentino, on Saturday 28 February from 5pm to 8pm.
Nigi, a Florentine who moved to Castelfiorentino, has extensive experience as a contributor to newspapers and curator of museum projects. He has successfully participated in various photography competitions and exhibited in various exhibitions in Italy and abroad. He has always been dedicated to personal photographic research projects related to social and environmental issues.
With the images from the project, “Tagli di luce”, exhibited at the Oratorio San Carlo, Nigi captures powerful, sharp lights a moment before darkness engulfs them or as they emerge from the black, and with them the people who, as Sabrina Fioravanti, curator of the texts, describes them, are “portrayed as fresh and elegant in their wonderful awareness of being the centre of attention and the focus of an intention”.
Lensi, a member of the Giglio Rosso Photography Group for over twenty years, of which he is also President, is not a professional photographer, but shares with Nigi an immense passion for this visual art and a solid bond of friendship. He likes to tell stories through images, always trying to convey the emotions of the moment captured. He and the members of the Giglio Rosso Photography Group are responsible for the photo shoots that tell the story of our municipality through images of people, places, events and shows.
With the images from the “A Year in the Life” project on display at the San Carlo from next Saturday, Lensi documents a 365-day journey, conceived and developed continuously from November 2020 to November 2021, and characterised by forced confinement during the Covid pandemic. Six years on from that period, after a necessary period of emotional detachment, the images re-emerge like frames from a lucid dream. They explore the duality of a suspended existence, moving between two opposing psychological poles: the interior and the elsewhere, a sort of contrast between a situation of “psychological stasis”, a forced blockage of everyone’s lives, and the desire to escape.
The author describes the feeling he experienced when, every day for 365 days, he took two photographs upon waking up, one of his bed and one immediately afterwards from the window, of the first car passing by: ‘We were all room travellers, prisoners within a perimeter of a few square metres, yet capable of travelling infinite distances by looking at a trail outside the window.’
The exhibition, which is sponsored by the Municipality of Castelfiorentino, will be inaugurated by the Councillor for Culture, Franco Spina.
‘We are thrilled to host an artistic dialogue at the San Carlo that focuses on the territory and its visual sensitivity,’ says Spina. “The two projects on display, despite their differences, merge into a coherent narrative that explores the contrasts between inside and outside, shadow and light, black and white. It is photography understood in its purest sense as “writing with light”. For us, promoting our talents means reaffirming Castelfiorentino as a vibrant centre of cultural production.”
The exhibition will remain open until 8 March with the following opening hours: Wednesday 4 and Thursday 5 from 9:00 to 13:00, Friday 6 from 9:00 to 14:00, Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 March from 11:00 to 13:00 and 15:00 to 19:00.
