Galleria Browning is pleased to host the exhibition ‘Venezia. Isole Verdi’ by Cristian Guizzo and Gian Luca Eulisse, presented below by curator Steve Bisson. At the opening of Saturday, November 16, 2013 Anna Branciforti will do a special reading on the theme of the exhibition.

The exhibition “Venezia. Isole Verdi (Venice. Green Islands)”, by photographers Cristian Guizzo and Gianluca Eulisse, signifies its contents from the title. While historically ‘Venetiae’ remember how the name of the city was declined in plural to represent its geographical diversity, on the other hand it invites us to free ourselves from the weight of a single, dominant imaginary, and to move more nimbly in an ‘other’ territory. Therefore among less explored places, islands not only of land but circumscribed subsets, spatial niches. The green character of these places thus expresses a desire to discover, to bring light, which is also a way for the photographer to reveal himself.

Greens are the lesser known islands of the Venetian lagoon, as well as the gardens of the city, hidden spaces and rarely accessible. It is in this distancing, while abandoning in order to get closer, in the anthropological gap and in the subsequent and “reverse” cognitive ability, that we find the first key to the exhibition project. It is then to be found in the dialogue between opposites - the use of color, the choices of the size and the number of prints, the distinct forms of vegetation observed - the way to decipher the two photographic intents, ‘distant’ from each other only in appearance. No coincidence that the exhibition “shuffle” the images, alternating them visually and physically, forcing the viewer to wonder about the possible relationships between the parts that make it up.

The images in black and white by Gianluca Eulisse are exhibited in a series of “reduced” size to facilitate a smooth reading of the landscape of the lagoon, an overview, as if to justify a background mood, and to produce an essential silence. Here the vegetation stands discrete in the eyes that often seem to seek an horizon, a reference. Almost to reduce loneliness. Persistent are the traces of human activity studied by the photographer standing between these ‘isolated’ natures. Natures that strip off in the cold, thus marking a behavior contrary to humans.

For Cristian Guizzo, instead, the color becomes the means to enhance the presence of green in relation to the built, as to contrast the different origins. The photographs printed on a large size highlight details, the typologies, the diversity, and even better they show, through the contrast between the solid and ancient architecture and the more decomposed and fresh vegetation, the intention, almost sculptural, to give body to the indissoluble need for a nature within the walls.

Whether it address the growth of a wisteria for a shade, or to fortify a bank to access the resources of the land, both photographic projects show the echo of the inexorable action of man to govern and sometimes abuse the environment . And so much more in Venice, in constant struggle with its own waters.

Galleria Browning
Via Robert Browning, 167
Asolo (TV) 31011 Italy
Ph. +39 042 355320
Ph. +39 348 3035938
studio.bisson@gmail.com

Opening hours
Saturday and Sunday
From 11.00am to 12.30pm and from 3.30pm to 7.30pm
Or by appointment