When Light Breathes

Artist Giovanni Frangi brings back into play a monumental project conceived twenty years ago, transforming it into an immersive meditation on the nocturnal landscape. Four continuous canvases - stretching roughly forty meters - unfurl like a single pictorial film; twenty sculptures in charred foam, lit at regular fifteen-minute intervals, modulate the perception of space and recreate the vertigo one feels near water, when light seems to breathe. The new display by Francesco Librizzi introduces the work as a vast stage set, designed to engage a brutalist architecture of crisp volumes, a central pillar, and a monumental staircase: not a neutral frame, but a counterpart that forces the work into close combat. Alongside Frangi, Giovanni Agosti provides the project’s critical reading, which also presents 135 sheets of notes, sketches, and detours: a worksite diary that dismantles the myth of instantaneous creation and offers multiple interpretive paths. Reactivating this visual machine today is not nostalgia, but a test of the image’s endurance: unrolling the canvases, letting them “breathe” again, and checking whether that passage between painting, sculpture, and time continues to open in the viewer’s gaze.