“So Far” is a solo exhibition by Maura Banfo exploring the relationship between presence, memory, and passage, bringing together photographic works, Polaroids, ink drawings, and pieces developed through a practice in which the image never coincides solely with what is visible. The title itself contains a tension: it marks a point reached, a temporary limit, but also the possibility of moving further. “So far” is both a statement and a threshold.
For many years, Maura Banfo has worked with photography as a medium capable of retaining traces of experience while simultaneously revealing their precariousness. In her work, landscape, the body, objects, and natural elements emerge as suspended presences, fragments of a narrative that is never definitively closed. The image thus becomes a mental space, traversed by absences, erasures, superimpositions, and returns.
The exhibition brings together different strands of the artist’s research, creating a path in which photography and mark-making remain in constant dialogue. The Polaroids, by virtue of their nature as unique and unrepeatable images, take on the value of small units of memory, while the ink interventions introduce a gestural, physical, almost script-like dimension. The mark does not illustrate the photographic image, but crosses through it, interrupts it, and alters its temporal structure. It is precisely in the distance between what photography records and what the gesture adds, removes, or conceals that the space of the work opens up.
In” So Far”, time does not unfold in a linear way. Past and present coexist within the same image, just as private experience and collective dimension overlap. Each work appears to question what remains after a passage: a trace, a surface, a detail, a memory resurfacing. Landscape itself is removed from a purely descriptive reading and becomes an emotional territory, a site of transformation.
The intimate scale of Crumb Gallery further emphasizes this sense of proximity. The works are not presented as isolated episodes, but as parts of a constellation in which viewers are invited to move slowly, recognizing correspondences, gaps, and discontinuities.
“So Far” therefore does not indicate a definitive point of arrival. It is the temporary measure of a distance travelled, a place from which to look back at what has been and imagine what may still happen. In Maura Banfo’s work, every image preserves this dual nature: a testimony to something that has passed and, at the same time, an opening towards what is still unknown.
