Rodney Smith – Roverella Palace, Italy

For the first time in Italy, Palazzo Roverella is hosting a major exhibition dedicated to Rodney Smith, one of the most iconic New York photographers of the 20th century. With over one hundred images, the exhibition traces the artist’s entire career , celebrating his refined combination of elegance, compositional rigor, and surreal humor. His photographs evoke worlds suspended between reality and dream, in which references to Magritte’s painting and the cinema of Hitchcock and Wes Anderson enrich a unique visual poetics of formal harmony and symbolic narration. The exhibition, divided into six sections, leads the visitor through suspended scenarios, rich in grace and mystery, accompanying them, through a dialogue built on emotion and wonder, to the discovery of an artist who knew how to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

I venture out into the world to breathe in its dubious reputation
and its humor, to see more clearly, to seek purpose and knowledge,
to open myself, to grasp the light exuberantly and relentlessly.

Rodney Smith

Immersing yourself in Rodney Smith‘s universe means entering a world where time stands still and lightness becomes form. Each of Rodney Smith’s shots is an invitation to cross a threshold: that between the real and the imaginary, between rigor and levity, between concreteness and lyricism. His images – never retouched, illuminated only by natural light – move between the nostalgia of black and white and the discovery of chromaticism, conveying an intimate yet universal vision. Rodney Smith observes reality to transform it : he plays with gravity, reflects on space, transcends symbolic and temporal canons. A student and follower of great masters such as Walker Evans and Cartier-Bresson, inspired by cinema and philosophy, he has made photography the language to offer an invitation to stop, observe, and be transported, with wonder, into the suspended moment where everything seems possible.