Journal

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Coming down the Giogo Pass towards Firenzuola, I had been impressed by the view of the rocks surfacing in the pastures and by the soft fields furrowed by streams and interrupted by the remains of the woods. The waters of the Santerno river engrave the earth, rip pebbles and stones away from the stratifications of the rock walls, and accumulate them in its bed, excavating them just like the workmen of these valleys quarry and then accumulate and organize pietra serena, a bluestone typical to the area. Later they will put it back together, in layers, as they cover walls, overlie the wood of coverings, or sometimes even a coarser metal sheet.
The unusually repeated conspicuousness of these three materials is tied to some thoughts on water and swimming. Bodies in movement, lightness, bodies exposed to the sun, looks. Shelter, water, and nature are strong sensations, almost as a jump of scale: deep chill, high heat, the contact of skin with stones, with grass, with water. All this with a vertigo from distance, with excessively fluid perspectives, with time as still as that of the slow sun in the heat of a summer afternoon. It’s an occasion of sensual experiences: breeze flows on the skin and on the limbs, seeming to make them breathe. It’s pores dilating, it’s the revelation of plastic physicality, startle and vertigo opposed to a classical principle of a balance between self and nature.
So it’s the order of a classical organism that governs, as well as the disorder and the estrangement of individual desires. The horizontality of water and stone against light and vegetation’s verticality. The undeletable traces of memories, all of them regarding thermal baths, porticos, and stoà, are opposed by the anti-perspective distance of tactile impressions, like the fear of slipping, the importance of contact with material, breeze and heat, deepening space, the vegetation, leaving the scene to views that evaporate in the sun, when reality yields to the dream of sensual light and glare, and arises surreal images of objects that lose the limits of their image, like the remains of an acropolis against the sky and the landscape.
The organism turns out to be interrupted both in its plan, stripped of some of its parts, and in its roofing, which is frequently cut open. But most of all it searches for a contrast between the stone-like shell of the structure, and the soft compensation carried out by the fixtures, the wood panels and the roofing, which is lightly set on the walls and pillars. The outcome is an assembly of dug out solids, set within an outline whose edges are constantly varied, towards the city or towards the river, just as if the organism had undergone erosions and washings by the waters of the river.

di Fabrizio Rossi Prodi