Guido Guidi: more moments, more points of view

A major Guido Guidi retrospective at MAXXI in Rome, featuring over 400 works, including rare, unpublished pieces and archival materials, demonstrates the artist’s depth of study and preference for “more moments, more points of view” in which the visible reveals the intangible essence of things. Rica Cerbarano writes that the exhibition offers illuminating insights into the behind-the-scenes of ‘art-making’ and hopes young artists will take away the lesson that, for Guidi, practice is something carefully thought out and built over a lifetime.

Rica Cerbarano | Exhibition review | 10 Apr 2025

Guido Guidi’s major retrospective at MAXXI in Rome is a rare example of an artist’s decades-long body of work being presented without grandiosity, allowing for an appreciation of its true artistic and cultural significance. Structured across two interconnected planes – the vertical display of the walls and the horizontal arrangement of the display cases – Col tempo, 1956-2024 traces the evolution of Guidi’s artistic vision, revealing that he is far more than just a photographer of vernacular architecture and Italy’s marginal places. This is not merely due to the variety of subjects he has captured – always with an obsessive attempt to seek a seriality of photographic procedure – but, more importantly, because of the depth of study and research that have shaped his thinking.

The exhibition – curated by Simona Antonacci, Pippo Ciorra and Antonello Frongia – features over 400 works, including numerous previously unpublished pieces and archival materials, following a curatorial narrative that offers precious insight into the ‘behind the scenes’ of art-making. At its core is a concept that proves to be illuminating for curious minds: his archive, adopted as a guiding framework for exploration, is highlighted also as a physical space through the account of the role that his home in Ronta di Cesena has played, as both a living space, a studio and a meeting place for emerging artists – a space where ‘personal biography and artistic process intertwine’.

Opening the show, the Preganziol series (1983) encapsulates the essence of Guidi’s artistic inquiry. Shot in an empty room in the province of Cesena, this work comprises 16 images, all taken within the confines of four bare walls. As the external light shifts, subtle transformations within the room become visible. Through this meticulous study, Guidi explores the passage of time and the way photography both interprets and transforms its subject. This symbolic introduction seamlessly leads into an exploration of Guidi’s evolving relationship with photography through 40 photographic sequences, curated by the artist himself, a three-channel video filmed inside his home-studio-archive – and an extensive collection of archival materials displayed in centrally positioned display cases.

This third level of the exhibition is crucial in fully grasping the depth of Guidi’s artistic vision, revealing how each image embodies a meditation on perception and the passage of time. The reconstruction of Guidi’s material universe begins with a selection of books from his personal library. These volumes – some of which are available for the public to browse – offer insight into the development of his research methodology. This collection extends beyond artist’s books and photobooks (including the catalogue from the Walker Evans exhibition at MoMA in New York, a pivotal reference for his practice) to encompass works on philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and a vast array of art history. Among the texts, one finds Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927) alongside James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920), John Cage’s For the Birds (1981), and Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel (1948). Essential influences such as Piero della Francesca, Giorgione and Paul Klee are also present, underscoring the diverse intellectual foundations that shape Guidi’s work.

These elements are all traces of what Guidi himself calls “eternal sonship” – an artistic practice rooted in imitation, references and citations. The study of his masters manifests as a meticulous formal investigation, a repertoire of subjects and compositions, echoes and correspondences that suggest the existence of a mental world woven from visual associations across distant epochs and disciplines. For instance, it is extremely fascinating to learn how, in his notes on two photographs by Walker Evans – prepared for a lecture on the American photographer – Guidi establishes a striking parallel between Evans’ Cottage at Ossining Camp Woods, New York, 1930 and Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection. In both works, as he notes, there are ‘on the left, trees without leaves; on the right, trees with leaves,’ highlighting a shared compositional structure that bridges photography and Renaissance painting.

Walker Evans’ profound influence on Guidi’s work becomes particularly evident in his exploration of façades, or “facce vista”, as noted in one of his commentaries – often accompanied by sketches and drawings analysing the composition of the works he discusses. As we can see in the sequence of façades presented in the exhibition, spanning 1970–1983, they mark a return to the square format and a more classical serial approach after a period of freer experimentation (for instance, the Di sguincio series), where photographs were instead the result of a ‘performance of the encounter’, unrefined and ‘rude’, allowing ‘to break out of the etiquette of aesthetic rules’, as Antonello Frongia writes in the book accompanying the exhibition, published by MACK in 2024.

Yet, this ‘rude character of his photography’ – what Guidi himself describes as the ability ‘to show things as they are, without refinement’ – also emerges in his study of façades, a subject that captivates him like a lover. Using a Hasselblad 6×6, he examined the ordinary postwar architecture of Italy’s provinces, capturing subtle variations in form shaped by shifting viewpoints and light conditions. Rather than adopting a taxonomic approach in the style of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Guidi’s method feels almost anthropological, evoking the portraiture of August Sander, as he emphasises the anthropomorphic qualities of these structures – that through the photographic frame turn into thinking entities, or more precisely, into observers.

This interest in vernacular architecture served as an entry point into Guido Guidi’s long-standing engagement with architecture, which actually began during his studies at the University Institute of Architecture in Venice. In the 1990s, his collaborations with the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal marked the first major international recognition of Guidi’s work as an artist, resulting in the start of a deeper engagement with architecture – leading to a series of commissions, exhibitions and publications.

Among the series dedicated to architects’ designs is the well-known documentation of the Brion Tomb by Carlo Scarpa, who was also his teacher. Guidi returned to this site for a decade, studying the interplay of light on surfaces and architectural geometries in what can be seen as a ritual of time. In this suspension between life and death, between light and shadow, Guidi’s definition of photography as ‘a form of prayer: a way to dignify things, to grant them presence’ is what resonates. It’s a process of waiting, in which the visible reveals the intangible essence of things.

Moving from one series to another hung up on the walls (from the early photographs collected here in Esercizi, Al mare and Attesa, to the research of the 1970s in Avanti e ritorno and Coincidenze; then from the works on Gibellina and the many other cities in the world, grouped here under the name “In Between Cities”, to the section dedicated to the “Officina cesenate”, his home-studio, and the study on the spaces of the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna, one of the schools where he taught), one can’t help but pause, observing the vitrines with curiosity and delight, where the theoretical and practical background of the artist unfolds. For example, alongside notebooks, early drawings and sketches of photographic compositions, we explore the technical aspect of his passion for photography, learning that in the early 1980s, he built several self-made prototypes of cameras using plywood. His experiments with printing are equally significant: after initially working with black-and-white photography in the darkroom and large-format techniques, over time Guidi fine-tuned his method of photographic printing and came to favour chromogenic contact prints.

Towards the end of the exhibition, some additional printing materials are presented, such as contact sheets and photocopies, selected by the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione, revealing the significant attention Guidi gives to post-production and the organisation of images. The experience is like being momentarily in the photographer’s studio, feeling his hands on the proof prints, carefully focusing on selected photographs or portions of images to be used. Finally, a number of display cases present the meticulous work that Guidi carried out in preparation for his lessons, all focused on visual motifs central to his thinking: the idea of collimation and the logic of sequences and symbols like arrows, stains, shadows, graphemes, letters, and façades.

If this exhibition leaves a lasting impression, it is not so much due to its size (undoubtedly the largest anthological exhibition ever dedicated to Guidi) or the quality of the works on display, but rather for its ability to convey the complexity behind the artistic research of an artist who has played a hugely significant role in transforming how we perceive landscapes and approach photography today. By opening the doors to the artist’s archive – both physical and mental – the exhibition reveals to the public that photography is not a matter of moments, but of time. “There’s something about Bresson’s decisive moment that doesn’t convince me,” says Guidi in an interview, who prefers “more moments, more points of view,” clearly distancing himself from the notion of the “unrepeatable image.” His images are endlessly repeatable – always the same yet subtly different, slow, where the time that accumulates is not just that of the gaze and light, but also of thought, built over a lifetime.

Even if you have never attended a lecture by Guido Guidi, it is evident that one of the most important lessons his work offers is the value of taking time to think, develop one’s practice without haste, and observe and listen carefully, to build a web of references that ward off the danger of self-referentiality. There is hope that young artists visiting this exhibition will leave with at least a fragment of this awareness. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and MAXXI Rome. © Guido Guidi

Guido Guidi. Col tempo, 1956-2024 runs at MAXXI Rome until 27 April 2025

–
Rica Cerbarano is a curator, writer, editor, and project coordinator specialising in photography. She writes regularly for Vogue Italia and Il Giornale dell’Arte, where she is the Co-Editor of the Photography section. She has also contributed to Camera Austria, Over Journal, Hapax Magazine, and Sali & Tabacchi, amongst others. In 2017, Cerbarano co-founded Kublaiklan, a collective that has curated exhibitions at Images Vevey (Switzerland), Gibellina PhotoRoad (Sicily, Italy), Cortona On The Move (Italy) and Photoszene Festival (Cologne, Germany), amongst others. In 2022, she was a member of the Artistic Direction Committee at Photolux Festival (Lucca, Italy), where she curated Seiichi Furuya: Face to Face, 1978 – 1985 and Robin Schwartz: Amelia & the Animals.

Images:

1-Guido Guidi, Tomba Brion, 2007

2-Guido Guidi, Cervia, 1979

3-Guido Guidi, Rimini Nord, 1991

4-Guido Guidi, San Giorgio di Cesena, 1985

5-Guido Guidi, Fosso Ghiaia, 1972

6-Guido Guidi, Palazzo Abatellis, 1997

7-Guido Guidi, Preganziol, 1981

8-Guido Guidi, San Mauro in Valle, 1956

9-Guido Guidi, Porto Marghera, 1988

10-Guido Guidi, Ronta, 2016

11-Guido Guidi, Ronta, 2004