Guido Guidi

PER STRADA (Along the road)
Photographs by Guido Guidi on State Road 9

curated by Antonello Frongia

in collaboration with Comune di Rubiera

For more than forty years, the road has been the Guido Guidi’s place of work. What settled in the critical discourse as photography “of the ordinary landscape” has primarily been for Guidi photography of the road, of the roadside, of what you see when you stop at the edge of the landscape, with one foot on the pavement and the other in that uncertain grass which is the frayed edge of the countryside. Road as space and as device, then, rather than as the symbol of a journey or a metaphor for adventure. An edge along which houses, fences, power lines, bollards, and road signs are situated, but also fragments, scraps, and residues, as if pushed by an undertow that attempts in vain to clear the landscape.

The exhibition Per strada. Photographs by Guido Guidi on State Road 9 presents a wide body of images created within the framework of a number of different projects carried out between 1983 and 2000. Around the reconstruction of the series made by Guidi for the 1986 exhibition Explorations along the Via Emilia, this exhibition traces an itinerary through the significant developments of Guidi’s language, from the studies on the frontality of facades in the black-and-white square format of his debut to the descriptive and structural precision in his large format colour plates created starting in the ‘80s. What emerges is an entire lexicon of visual structures and problems, of solutions and variations, generated from grappling with the very matter of things and from the relationship with old and newer travelling companions.

BIOGraphy

Guido Guidi (born in 1941, Cesena) lives and works in Cesena and Venice.

His work has been exhibited in Italy and abroad in important institutions and museums including the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur (CH), the Guggenheim and the Whitney Museum in New York (USA), the Centre Pompidou in Parigi (F), and the Venice Biennale. His published works include Varianti (& Art, Udine, 1995); SS9 (IUAV/ Linea di Confine, Rubiera, 2000); In Between Cities (Electa, Milan / Linea di Confine, Rubiera, 2003); VOL. 1 (Electa, Milan, 2006); A New Map of Italy (Loosestrife Editions, Washington, 2011); Carlo Scarpa’s Tomba Brion (Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2011), Veramente, (MACK, London, 2013); Guardando a Est (Linea di Confine/ Koenig Books, Rubiera/London, 2015).