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Overview
A photographic journey exploring the themes of irony, rigour and visual poetry. For the first time in Italy, Palazzo Roverella hosts a major exhibition dedicated to Rodney Smith, one of the most iconic New York photographers of the 20th century. With over 100 images, the exhibition retraces the author's entire career, celebrating his refined combination of elegance, compositional rigour, and surreal humour. His photographs evoke worlds suspended between reality and dreams, in which references to the paintings of Magritte and the films of Hitchcock and Wes Anderson enrich a singular visual poetic vision anchored on formal harmony and symbolic narration.
The exhibition itinerary, divided into six sections, leads the visitor along suspended scenarios, rich in grace and mystery, accompanying them, through a dialogue built on emotion and amazement, to discover an author who has been able to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Every Rodney Smith camera shot is an invitation to cross a threshold, to embrace the imaginary, straddling between rigour and lightness, between concrete awareness and lyricism. Rodney Smith observes reality in order to transform it: he plays with gravity, reflects on space, and breaches symbolic and temporal conventions.
Each photograph is a reflection, an inverted echo of reality, an impression. All of Smith's images are replicas of reality, imaginary duplicates of the world that retain only the essential: mnemonic traces that inhabit our dreams. Ethereal, ecstatic, and masterful, his photographs encapsulate only what is original, leaving no trace or clue as to the places, time, or circumstances of what Smith reveals to us. They conceal rather than reveal; they withdraw rather than engage with the viewer. In essence, they always hide something rather than reveal a reality whose essence is ultimately unknown. Paradoxically, Smith sows doubt precisely through his photography, an infallible and invincible tool for reproducing reality.
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