The Pino Pascali Foundation is opening on 10 October at 6.30 pm, on the occasion of the Giornata del Contemporaneo, Off the Ground, a solo exhibition by Attilio Solzi, curated by Michele Spinelli.
For the first time, the exhibition brings together in its entirety The Absence, a project developed by the artist over the course of one year and comprising 365 photographs taken along the Paullese state road between Milan and Cremona.
The title Off the Ground evokes a condition of suspension. In Solzi’s practice, this becomes a device through which attention is shifted away from the subject and toward the conditions of its presence. The body, a central element of his work, disappears from the image, allowing what would normally remain at the margins of our gaze to emerge: supports, traces, structures, and spatial relationships.
Absence thus coincides with a different form of representation.
The work originates from a plastic chair chained to a pole along the Paullese. An ordinary object of everyday use which, over time, reveals itself as a device for occupying space, a tool of work, and a sign of a presence that is as constant as it is invisible.
For twelve months, Solzi returns every day to the same spot, photographing the chair in the position in which he finds it. Changes in light, seasons, and weather conditions construct a sequence in which time becomes the material of the image.
The project’s rigorous seriality recalls certain experiences within conceptual photography, while finding its own specificity in its close adherence to the present. The body never appears, yet it continues to determine every image. The chair becomes the measure of an absence, an indirect portrait of an existential and social condition.
The exhibition design transforms the Foundation’s three main galleries into a single path extending approximately one hundred linear metres. The 365 photographs are installed in a continuous progression that unfolds the entire span of time recorded by the project. The repetition of the images does not create an archive, but rather an experience of passage, in which the exhibition space assumes the rhythm of the time registered by the artist.
The exhibition is completed by a video room bringing together photographic material, collages, and moving images produced by Solzi. Accompanied by an intense soundscape, the video introduces a different dimension of his research—more fragmented and direct—creating a tension with the silent and contemplative character of the photographic installation.
On the occasion of the exhibition, a new edition of the artist’s book The Absence will also be presented, expanded to include the complete photographic sequence and accompanied by critical texts by Giuseppe Teofilo, fondazione Pascali’s director, Rischa Paterlini, collezione Spada curator and Michele Spinelli, exhibition curator.
Attilio Solzi works across photography, video, collage, and artist’s books. His research develops through a conceptual
