Guido Guidi: Interview with Alessandro Rabottini, Curator of the Exhibition Dedicated to the Photographer of the Essential, On View at 10 Corso Como.
There are artists whose practice, over time, settles into a form of thought that eludes the logic of spectacle. Guido Guidi is one of them. Through a steadfast dedication to photography as his sole medium and a gaze that appears modest yet is profoundly subversive, Guidi has shaped an aesthetics of the essential—where every peeling wall or reflection of light becomes a silent epiphany of time’s passage.
Da un’altra parte, the exhibition dedicated to his work at 10·Corso·Como originates from the visionary eye and curatorial sensitivity of Alessandro Rabottini, one of the most perceptive and radical voices in today’s contemporary art scene. With his ability to move fluidly across media and disciplines, Rabottini has built a project that does more than simply present Guidi’s work: it listens to it, inhabits it, questions it.
The exhibition moves along the thread of a “poetics of attention”—an invitation to linger, to truly observe, to be touched by shadow—not as a void, but as a place where light, space, and memory meet. The curatorial choice to break apart the photographic series in favor of poetic and formal tensions reinforces the idea of photography not as description, but as evocation; not as affirmation, but as inquiry.
We spoke with Rabottini about this project, which stems from years of reflection and desire—about the political value of attention, the quiet radicality of Guidi’s visual language, and the potential held by an image that appears “empty” to restore an ethical stance toward the world.
In an age dominated by urgency and overexposure, Da un’altra parte reminds us that to see is already to think, that in shadow lies a form of truth, and that perhaps it is only through what escapes us—through emptiness, silence, and reflection—that we can truly learn to inhabit the world again.
AG: The exhibition revolves around the concept of shadow as both a visual and conceptual device. How did this theme guide the selection and sequencing of the images, and what do you think it reveals about Guidi’s broader poetics?
AR: I had wanted to make an exhibition with—and about—Guido Guidi for years. However, when approaching an artist as complex and with decades of work behind them, one must seek a curatorial perspective that is both precise and generous, in the hope of enriching the interpretation of that artist s work. Since I don’t come from a background in photography, I began by asking myself what aspect of Guidi’s practice struck me so profoundly. The answer, I realised, lies in his ability to make the passage of time feel palpable—almost tactile.
This incredibly subtle gift he offers to the viewer stems from focusing on just a few essential elements: light and its variations, the most quotidian spaces, or the most ordinary things right in front of us. That’s when I began to think of the shadow as a possible theme to explore various decades of Guidi’s work through. In fact, shadow is the locus where light, space, and the passage of time converge.
The exhibition is composed of shadows and reflections, of partially obscured human presences, of glimmers and fragile traces. Even the title Da un’altra parte (“Elsewhere”) hints at something that has passed, that we may have missed, that is already somewhere else.
AG: You’ve written that Guidi’s work asserts a “poetics of attention”—a beautiful expression that seems to suggest a form of resistance to today’s distracted gaze. What does “attention” mean to you today, in the context of photography and curating?
AR: I believe we are all, at once, victims and perpetrators of a paradox: we demand attention without being able to give it. If we observe certain stylistic choices in contemporary photography, notwithstanding the risk that any generalisation entails, we see that a large portion of the images we are surrounded by, from advertising to social media, are conceived to grab attention rather than offer it.
The opposite happens in Guido Guidi’s work: his photographs occupy a kind of “discreet” space in our perception—they could almost go unnoticed. They don’t clamour for attention; instead, they appear committed to offering it to the most humble objects, to the simplest spaces. This generates something quite special: the viewer is given a chance to redeem their gaze, to step outside a regime of continuous seduction that so often governs our looking.
As for me, more simply, I’d say that curating an exhibition or a catalogue is inherently tied to a form of attention—it’s built on a selective gaze. That gaze has a purpose: to offer what we believe is worthy of being seen, hoping that it may also capture the attention of others —and perhaps even history itself. Curation, then, becomes a form of preservation born from admiration, from the desire to care for what moves us.
You’re right to speak of “resistance,” because I truly believe that attention, especially today, holds a powerful political role: it pushes back against cynicism, the erosion of cultural values, and the extractivist position we too often take toward things, the environment, and each other. A society begins to lose itself when it stops paying attention to things, gestures, and postures. We should keep in mind what Simone Weil wrote: that attention is “the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
AG: Guidi’s work seems to oscillate between lyricism and rigour, between abstraction and concreteness. How did you work to preserve this balance in the curatorial construction of the exhibition?
AR: I would actually say we worked on it, because everything was shaped through a close, ongoing dialogue with Guido. And I want to thank him here for his extraordinary human openness and intellectual generosity, which were both rare and deeply meaningful to me.
The coexistence you speak of—between lyricism and rigour, abstraction and concreteness—is something we find in Guidi’s work with remarkable consistency. It’s a quality that feels both deliberate and spontaneous. Many of his photographs display a particular geometry in the framing, but if you look closely, you realise it’s not a geometry imposed upon reality. Quite the opposite—it’s a geometry revealed by reality itself.
Something similar happens with the tension between abstraction and concreteness: some images possess the clarity and purity of abstract composition, yet their “matter” is deeply rooted in the real, such as a toolshed wall, a stretch of asphalt, the metal frame of an empty billboard.
AG: I was struck by a phrase in the exhibition text: “an image that contains almost nothing.” Can we speak about the role of “emptiness” in Guidi’s work, not as lack, but as a space for openness and suspension?
AR: The idea of an empty image sounds like a paradox—and yet, in Guidi’s work, nothingness or near-nothingness often becomes visible. There’s a photograph in the exhibition, taken in Treviso in 1979, that I’d like to use as an example: it’s a black-and-white image of a wall, with a blank sheet of paper taped to it. It could have been taken anywhere, at any time. There are no clues to tell us where we are or when.
One almost gets the feeling that this image is waiting to welcome others, as if it were a screen for our imagination, ready to reflect whatever we might project onto it. However, as a photograph, it is also a tangible reminder of something that once existed and no longer does. Thus we find ourselves within this productive contradiction, this perceptual tension: the photograph draws us toward a real that slips away even as it opens a space for our inner world.
AG: The artist’s shadow frequently appears in the exhibition, as if the photographic process itself were being made visible, the act of seeing staged. How did this element make you reflect on authorship and the construction of vision?
AR: There’s something deeply sincere in the way Guidi’s shadow enters certain images. That presence connects to many of the themes and atmospheres that recur throughout his work. In some cases, by revealing the author within the image, that shadow makes us aware of photography as an individual act of construction—a gesture of framing, of choosing what part of reality to show. In other instances, it underscores the fleeting, unstable, and transitory nature of what the lens has captured.
I see this “sincerity” as part of a broader absence of artifice that permeates Guidi’s work. The framing is carefully crafted, but it never appears over-calculated or laborious. His photographs possess an almost effortless elegance—the kind that arises not from a desire to seduce or persuade, but from a quiet clarity of intent. They offer us a delicate balance between truth and composition.
AG: You chose to disassemble Guidi’s photographic series, selecting individual images and allowing them to converse through “poetic and formal tensions.” It’s a bold, almost musical decision. How did you go about composing this visual score?
AR: For years, certain photographs by Guido Guidi haunted me—I kept returning to them in my mind. I realised that some of them were profoundly mysterious, far from descriptive, with an elusive, almost intangible quality. I began to piece them together mentally, intuitively connecting the dots.
Later, as I studied his work more closely, I discovered that Guidi himself had explored this kind of intuitive narrative in books such as Tra l altro (1976–81), Veramente, and more recently, Di sguincio (1969–81). However, above all, it was his book, Lunario, that inspired me and convinced me that this was the path I wanted to follow for the exhibition.
Lunario, published in 2020, brings together photographs taken between 1968 and 1999, arranged around the suggestions evoked by the moon—tracing within the images the visual echoes of its form. It’s a book that bypasses traditional genre distinctions in favor of a lyrical sequence of images suspended in time. I was convinced that this quality—the lyrical rhythm, the openness—was essential to his entire body of work, and that it could serve as a valid method for constructing the exhibition.
If you create space around many of Guidi’s photographs—both physically in the installation and mentally in your reading—you begin to see how his work fits within a deeply Italian tradition, one that finds silence in the everyday. A tradition that spans from Antonioni and Morandi all the way back to Piero della Francesca.
AG: Over the years, you ve worked across many visual languages—from artists’ cinema to more installation-based photography. Where does Guidi’s work sit within your curatorial and personal journey? What has it taught you or given back to you?
AR: What I’m about to say may sound like a contradiction, but I genuinely believe that Guido Guidi’s work conveys something that transcends the boundaries of disciplines and media, precisely because it reflects a lifelong, exclusive dedication to a single expressive tool: photography. That devotion, carried out with both coherence and experimentation, has turned a gaze so deeply critical of monumentality and spectacle into a reference point for the discipline at an international level, even if, in principle, it would have been harder to assert.
Guidi has forged a path with a style that, on paper, might have seemed too elusive, too “lateral,” too focused on the humble and the banal—even too anti-authorial—to ever become iconic. And yet, that’s exactly what has happened. That’s why I say his aesthetic vision reveals an ethical stance, a way of inhabiting the world.
And it’s this synthesis—between how one looks at the world and how one lives in it—that I find to be an essential lesson, now more than ever. This is one of the most personal exhibitions I’ve ever curated. It contains so much of what I seek in art. And I’m deeply grateful to Tiziana Fausti for creating the conditions that made it possible.
AG: Looking at the broader trajectory of Italian photography—and perhaps even beyond that—where would you place Guidi’s work today? In your view, what is his legacy, and what makes it radical in the context of contemporary visual culture?
AR: I’m glad you used the word radical, because when an artist pays close attention to the simplest, most everyday things—as Guidi does—there’s always the risk of their work being read as nostalgic or merely consolatory. But this is something else entirely. Here we are faced with an aesthetic that is indeed poetic, but also austere; contemplative, yet analytical, critical—at times even rough-edged.
There are photographs of his in which we can surrender to a lyrical sense of wonder—but just as many that challenge our expectations of what a “beautiful” image is supposed to be. Immersed as we are in a visual regime that feeds on dopamine, we tend to forget certain things every day: that architecture, like our bodies, is fragile and destined to decay; that objects and spaces inevitably vanish, but in the meantime, we have the chance to care for them; that to observe something with patience, over time, gives us the possibility of truly understanding it.
These are values that Guidi’s work expresses, and which I see increasingly resonating with many artists—emerging and established—not just in photography. On a stylistic level, his influence is undeniable. But more than that, I think his work speaks to a cultural need, even before an aesthetic one: a need that more and more people recognize today—a need to reorder certain priorities, and to resist an attention economy that, because of our chronic lack of it, drives every discourse—political, social, visual—toward excess.
Guidi’s work, instead, invites us to stop for a moment, to fix our gaze on how light enters a room—and in doing so, to realize that, as Ocean Vuong so beautifully wrote, on Earth we’re briefly gorgeous.
