Snapping the time. Suspending the moment that was present, but no longer past. Telling and showing pieces of history in a moment of impression. Photography is focal attention of a journey. Photography is discovery of distant places to make them close. Hiroshi Sugimoto – an international Japanese photographer born in 1948 – cancels the passage of time, capturing only that which constructs it.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Viaggio in Italia, exhibition view, Galleria Continua, Roma St Regis Rome, 2023, photo by Sebastiano Luciano, courtesy the Artist and Galleria Continua

With a series of recent pictures, Viaggio in Italia is the title of an exhibition by one of the greatest exponents of contemporary photography, presented for the first time in the spaces of Galleria Continua’s The St. Regis hotel in Rome. Each shot is a tribute, a memory, an emotion. Voices from the past pour into the images with delicate steadfastness. Sugimoto is evocative in his making, a tireless observer of details that define the whole. For the artist, time is a constant of expectation in his research, to fix memories and certainties. Moreover, time is not only the theme of his work, but the medium that justifies his favorite medium: chemical film development, overexposures, shutters at the limits of the shot. The choice of black and white as the only possible manifestation highlights the subjects and at the same time blends them, circumscribes their essence to focus attention.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Viaggio in Italia, exhibition view, Galleria Continua, Galleria Continua, Roma St Regis Rome, 2023, photo by Sebastiano Luciano, courtesy the Artist and Galleria Continua

The title of the exhibition refers to Goethe’s Grand Tour, recounted in the homonym book, and to the Italian stops of the four Japanese delegates Tenshō ken’ō shisetsu (“The Tenshō Embassies in Europe” or commonly remembered as “the Four Boys” ed.). In both tributes, despite the two centuries that divide them (1813 the former and 1585 the latter), the description and narrative of the architecture, landscapes, art and emotions experienced by the protagonists are equally manifested in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs. The facades of the cathedral of Florence and Siena, the tower of Pisa, shrouded in a shimmering blackness that highlights their construction. Amalfi Coast from the Seascapes series in which the nullification of the boundary between sky and water cancels out the inexorable passage of time. The Theaters series-carried on for more than four decades-illuminates in semi-darkness interior details of buildings to highlight what might be superfluous. In these photographs, stalls are whitewashed by projection screens that, in the exposure time of the shot, capture the entire film, converging sounds, images, shapes and colors, into a bright white rectangle.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Duomo Florence Siena, stampa in gelatina d’argento, 149 x 119,4 cm (cad), 2014, Galleria Continua, Roma St Regis Rome, 2023, photo by Sebastiano Luciano, courtesy the Artist and Galleria Continua

The works in the exhibition – accompanied by a text, more biographical than critical, written by Ilaria Bernardi – united by the theme of time and the inherent narrative, privilege artifice to the human figure, as an exegesis of a quest without fixed collocations, eternal and free as a visionary intuition.

Info:

Hiroshi Sugimoto. Viaggio in Italia
Con testo critico di Ilaria Bernardi
24/11 2023 – 13/01 2024
The St. Regis Rome
Via Vittorio Emanuele Orlando 3, Roma

Massimiliano Bastardo

Art Curator and Art Advisor, graduated in Visual Arts and Cultural Mediation, with Master in Curatorial Practices, born in 1995, lives in Naples. He collaborates with Galleries and Independent Spaces, his research is mainly focused on Emerging Painting, with a careful and inclined gaze also on other forms of aesthetic language.