“Orizzonte in Italia” is a work by Antonio Rovaldi born from the bicycle trip made in 2011 along the perimeter of the Italian peninsula. At the Gavoi Literary Festival – “The Island of Stories” which will take place from 3 to 6 July 2014 – and until 31 August 2014, the MAN Museum will present, in the spaces of the Municipal Museum, the series of 148 photographs of the horizon created on that occasion by the artist, accompanied by an unpublished sound work, also the result of the experience of the trip to Italy.

Gavoi’s exhibition is the first part of a work in two stages which will conclude in Nuoro, in the spaces of the MAN museum, in February 2015, at the end of a new journey made – once again by bicycle – along the perimeter of Sardinia.

“During the trip to Italy – explained Rovaldi – I photographed the horizon line at more or less regular intervals, depending on my body’s reaction to physical efforts. I collected many images of the horizon at different hours of the day and evening, a very long chromatic pentagram viewed from the Italian coast, from North to South and then again from South to North, going up again.”

The empty spaces between one image of the horizon and the next are, in the journey as in the photographic installation, moments of emptiness and suspension, physical pauses of a breath that seems to capture the sinuous line of the coast in a single glance, filling for a the partiality of our vision of the landscape is instant. The precise awareness of the morphology of the Italian coast thus becomes an abstract and metaphysical image of a feeling that fades into the horizon.

“I like to think of photography not so much as a single image but, rather, as a chain of images that chase each other, punctuated by short or long pauses, as is the pattern of breathing when riding a bicycle covering long distances : sometimes breathing becomes labored, other times it slows down, flat and horizontal like our visual horizon. The photographic film extends along the horizon line, covering, line after line, portions of territory”.

A bilingual catalogue, published by Humboldt Books, will be presented in February, on the occasion of the exhibition at the MAN Museum. The book will compare the different ideas of horizon, the different perceptions of oneself and of the path undertaken, in relation to the different geographical concepts of the Island and the Peninsula.

Antonio Rovaldi was born in Parma in 1975. Active between New York and Italy, his research develops through different media, such as photography, video, sculpture and drawing. Winner of the Columbia University New York Prize in 2006, he has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries, both in Italy and abroad. Among his latest solo exhibitions we remember those at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, at the Monitor gallery in Rome and at The Goma gallery in Madrid.