Riccardo Varini

Italian artist Riccardo Varini’s photographs, imbued with a delicate poetry, are distinguished by their sober, essential language. His landscapes are inner landscapes that invite contemplation.

Riccardo Varini: slow photography, a geography of the soul

Riccardo Varini’s photographs depict landscapes. Yet these are not mere reproductions, or “identical” prints on photographic film, but rather evocative, sometimes almost evanescent landscapes. Varini calls the landscape photographs he takes a “geography of the soul”: the “ordinary spaces” where he grew up, and which as such are charged with memory and emotion, are transmuted in his camera into inner landscapes.

His images do not seek to evoke (only) the photographer’s personal memory, but something more universal: a dream, a state of mind, a sensation. They do not seek to surprise, but rather to invite reflection and quiet contemplation. For Riccardo Varini, photography acquires a therapeutic connotation through its ability to slow down and expand time, offering pauses in the frenzy of everyday life. Slow photography, where subjects lose their spatio-temporal connotations, suspended in a moment outside time.

“Varini doesn’t document a visible landscape, but the projection of that landscape (although there is a close link with his locations). Found image meets imagined image. This is a ‘landscape of feeling’, of places that have abandoned their physicality to arrive at a landscape that is no longer geographical but metaphysical.” Giuseppe Cicozzetti

Back to basics and the simple things of everyday life

Two people have had a decisive influence on Riccardo Varini’s art: the first is his father, who instilled in him a love of nature and the simple things of life during days spent in the peace and silence of the riverside, or in the mountain woods of his region. The landscapes of the Po, the Apennines and the Riviera Romagnola have left a deep impression on the artist: “I’m very attached to my land, it’s my life. My homeland has influenced my soul.”

The second is Luigi Ghirri, a photographer from Varini’s native province, a spokesman for conceptual, reflexive photography. Riccardo Varini met him in 1984 and has considered him his master ever since. He explains that he learned from him a different way of weaving narratives with images: attention to everyday subjects, a slow, contemplative gaze, and the construction of an expansive framing of spaces and voids. Riccardo Varini borrows from him the concept of the “threshold”, which he develops in his own work: a starting point from which we can observe, look further, and let our imagination run free. It’s a distance that establishes a sense of respect for the landscape. Visually, this concept is reflected in the recurrence of windows, bridges and horizons in his photographs.

Riccardo Varini’s personal language, however, has its origins in an accident: one day, the contemporary photographer decided to print an overexposed image and noticed that it was practically white, with most of the detail having disappeared. The image rendered only the essentials, with a simplicity of color and line that he very much appreciated. Since then, he has worked to “clean up” the image right from the start, and this practice forms the basis of his minimalist, delicate language of light tones. This sober aesthetic combines perfectly with its elegant, carefully considered compositions.

A marriage between photography, painting and poetry

In his youth, Riccardo Varini devoted himself to painting and poetry. He began photographing as a self-taught artist in the late 70s, attracted by the photographic medium’s capacity for synthesis. However, his relationship with painting marked the beginning of his career and has remained with him ever since. His artistic approach is indeed influenced by Chiarismo lombardo, a pictorial movement of the 30s characterized by the use of clear, light-infused colors. In particular, he admired the essential ‘chiaristi‘ landscapes of Italian painter Gino Gandini. For the compositions of his interior series and portraits, the photographer draws inspiration from the paintings of the American Edward Hopper, and 17th-century Dutch painters such as Vermeer and Rembrandt.

The influence of painting extends to the print: Riccardo Varini personally prints his contemporary photographs onto cotton paper. This medium gives the image a velvety, matte effect that is visually reminiscent of watercolor. The printed image, delicate as in a dream, further expresses the idea of poetry inscribed in his photographs. For the artist: “Photography is a poetry that you have inside you and that you seek outside”.

“Some might call them simple landscapes, but I think they’re poems, without words or with words hidden in fog and light, as is the case with Japanese haiku. Everything we see captures our attention and invites us to think. In Riccardo’s poetics, the seasons are all united in his soul. And they speak to us. You just have to listen.” Emanuele Ferrari

Recognition from the world of photography

Riccardo Varini (1957) lives and works in his native Reggio Emilia. After almost 30 years as a photographer, in 2006 he opened his town’s first photography gallery, which became a place for exchange and training. His career is punctuated by awards and appearances at renowned events. In 2009, he took part in the Fotografia Europea international festival in Reggio Emilia, and in 2013 in the symposium on Luigi Ghirri organized by the British School in Rome. A few years later, in 2012, one of his photographs was chosen by the French newspaper Le Monde to represent the MIA (Milan Image Art Fair).

Skira, the Italian publisher that specialises in art books, published a monograph on Riccardo Varini’s work in 2015, with texts by Italian art critic Arturo Carlo Quintavalle. The following year, a major anthological exhibition of 170 works was inaugurated at the Chiostri di San Domenico, in collaboration with the Museums and Municipality of Reggio Emilia. The Emilian artist’s photographs are archived at Parma University’s CSAC (Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione), among those of important names in Italian photography, and at Rome’s MAXXI museum. Alongside his artistic activity, he also teaches, giving photography courses and seminars.

Video: the outdoor scenes were filmed by Alessandro Scillitani.