Guido Guidi. Col tempo, 1956–2024

Guido Guidi, born in Italy in 1941, belongs to a generation of artists who profoundly transformed the relationship between photographic language and the perception of territory. His attention extends both to fragments of ordinary, seemingly unremarkable landscapes in Romagna—the region where he has always lived—and to emblematic works by major figures in architecture. By granting equal importance to the banal and the monumental, to overlooked details as well as established forms, he gradually forged a radical position, to the point of being recognized today by his peers as a key reference in the history of the medium.

For Guidi, “the relationship with what one looks at, the performance of the encounter, is essential.” To explore this relationship is also to conceive of photography as a “note,” a humble “scribble,” a “tentative attempt.” He thus rejects any complacency toward the single image and the perfect work. For him, to “resolve” an image is to attempt to reconcile a reflection on the primacy of the experience of seeing, on the specificity of the medium that records it, and on the passage of time. As he explains: “I think of photography as a process of knowledge—I do not believe in a definitive result—there are only stages.” Through daily acts of photographing, neither strictly typological nor serial, a poetic archive of territory gradually takes shape: an accumulation of viewpoints, variations and discoveries, comings and goings, repetitions, chance encounters and insistences, far removed from any pursuit of artifice or virtuosity.

The photographic sequences in the exhibition unfold as a continuous line of more than two hundred images. They trace the entirety of Guidi’s work, from his black-and-white experiments of the 1960s and 1970s to his later research on landscape and architecture, and up to his most recent projects. Notebooks, manuscripts, maquettes, and previously unseen documents shed light on certain aspects of his method. Structured by the photographs and the intervals between them, the exhibition’s progression—through its rigor and the subtlety of its variations—invites us into the photographic core of Guidi’s thinking, its artistic density, and the beauty of its unfolding path.