“ A cloud has descended on me.” recounts Antonio Rovaldi’s bicycle journey around Sardinia. The exhibition at the MAN Museum – which follows last year’s exhibition in Gavoi, on the occasion of the “Isola delle Storie” Literary Festival – is part of the project Horizon in Italy , begun by the artist in 2011 and concluded with the Sardinian experience in the summer of 2014.
The exhibition, conceived specifically for the museum rooms, consists of a photographic installation made up of 20 elements corresponding to as many stages of the journey. Images of the horizon – in line with the general project – on which the artist reports the sections traveled, reconstructing a sort of punctuation of the perimeter of the island, as well as a new chromatic pentagram to tell of “a distance”.
An audio installation accompanies the images, a montage of voices of the inhabitants of the area, questioned by the artist on the paths to take to reach the set goals. What is created is a surreal dialogue, based on a personal idea of distance between places and things. The directions of the map of Sardinia followed by the artist are constantly contradicted and redesigned by the people encountered, creating a true oral mapping of the territory.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a bilingual catalogue, published by Humboldt Books, which collects the entire project Horizon in Italy , with travel notes, images, drawings and texts by Lorenzo Giusti Leonardo Passarelli, Pier Luigi Tazzi and Francesco Zanot.
Antonio Rovaldi
Born in Parma in 1975. His research moves around themes relating to the perception of places and landscape, always relating the different media used, such as photography, video, sculpture. The dimension of the distance between places, the physical and mental crossing in them, whether real or imaginary, are a constant in his research. Since 2006, Rovaldi has shared his adopted city, Milan, with New York where he has participated in several artist residencies and exhibitions. Among his most recent solo exhibitions are those at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, at the Monitor gallery in Rome and at The Goma gallery in Madrid.
