This series was inspired by Giacomo Leopardi‘s lyric poem L’infinito (Infinity), and it emerged from Giacomelli’s contact with Luigi Crocenzi, who theorised the photo-story and the montage of images.
‘The photographer concentrates on the fundamental crux of Leopardi’s famous poem: “the emergence of an ‘I’ from a sensation of infinity, which is rooted in a specific place” (the hill at Recanati and the hedge that simultaneously prevents us from contemplating the horizon and allows us to exercise our imagination within a limitless space and time). This duality is expressed throughout Giacomelli’s photographic sequence, which alternates between textured surfaces that halt our gaze (walls, paving, tarmac roads) and more abstract, indefinite images (often characterised by effects of softening or double exposure). This opens up to a subjective reading of the series, which cannot be immediately grasped and is not uniform.’
(M Andreani in Mario Giacomelli. Giacomo Leopardi, L’infinito, A Silvia, Silvana Editoriale, 2019)
