Riccardo Varini describes his photography as “whispering”. This word alone expresses the subtle but tenacious appeal of his images. With him, there are no extraordinary subjects, no flashy colors or other forms of grandiloquence. With a pared-down language, the artist transforms the landscapes of his native Emilia-Romagna, Italy, into sensitive visual poems.
For Riccardo Varini, photography is neither an exact rendering of reality, nor the spectacular capture of a decisive moment. Rather, it seeks to open a breach, a breath, a threshold. A self-taught photographer, Varini began his artistic career in 1979, but it was his meeting with Luigi Ghirri that profoundly changed his outlook. Through Ghirri, he discovered a different way of making images: attentive to everyday life, slow, meditative, constructed by light and empty spaces.
Varini’s work is characterized by a constant tension between disappearance and presence. His photographs seem intent on erasing the contours of the world, the better to reveal its essence. “For me, photography is also a means of creating poetry, of slowing down the frenetic pace of the present age”, he asserts. This posture translates visually into an aesthetic of purity, where colors are desaturated, objects reduced to their simplest form, and scenes bathed in diaphanous light.
His approach is rooted in a founding accident: a accidentally overexposed print produces an almost white image, stripped of all superfluous elements. This visual shock became the matrix of a minimalist photographic language. From then on, Varini worked with light as if it were matter: deliberate overexposure, reduced palette, disappearance of frills. “Only the essential remains”, he says. His compositions are precisely constructed: a few elements – often inanimate – set in vast empty spaces, “so that they can breathe”. The rest is silence.
His images capture what eludes description: a state of mind, an intimate resonance, a “geography of the soul” in his own words. The landscapes of the Po, the Apennines or the Riviera Romagnola – Italian regions with which he is familiar – become interior places, charged with memory and reminiscence, but never anecdotal. They speak less of him than of us all, of our diffuse emotions and shared solitudes.
In the Silenzi Bianchi series, white dominates. Snow and mist cover the landscapes, abolishing spatial landmarks. All that remains are a few bare trees, soft lines and almost obliterated shapes. In contrast to fast, talkative photography, Varini proposes a slow, almost meditative style.
These motifs deepen in the Inverni series. Winter landscapes are shown under snow or in fog, imbued with peace and silence. Leafless trees and the silhouettes of distant animals stand out against the white expanse, creating delicate, graphic compositions. In some of the photographs, a turquoise surface appears in the foreground: the window of the photographer’s car. As is often the case with Varini’s work, this surface acts as a symbolic threshold: a poetic separation, an invitation to contemplate the world without imposing oneself on it.
What makes his work so singular is the unity between artistic intent, visual language and the materiality of the image. Varini controls every step of the creative process and arranges every element of the image, right down to its absence. He prints his own photographs on cotton paper, striving for a velvety, matte finish akin to watercolor. “It was this idea of sobriety that prompted me to look for cotton paper, which blends perfectly with my own language”, he explains.
His refusal to title his photographs is part of this openness: each image becomes a space available to the viewer’s imagination. “I want those who look at them to feel free to attribute their own meaning to them”, he asserts. Rather than fix a meaning, Varini prefers to evoke an emotion, an inner resonance, a suspended moment.
In a world saturated with sometimes boisterous images, Riccardo Varini‘s work acts as a salutary counterpoint. He reminds us that the image can be a place of silence, of slowness, of an inner look. It is photography that doesn’t try to show everything, but rather makes room for what remains unsaid.
Riccardo Varini
Riccardo Varini is an Italian photographer born in Reggio Emilia (Italy) in 1957. His work features in the collections of the CSAC in Parma, the MAXXI in Rome and other major institutions. Spotted by Cristina Franzoni (Zoom Magazine) for his landscapes of the Apennines, he was encouraged to exhibit internationally. In 2007, Professor Arturo Carlo Quintavalle added his work to the CSAC archives and prefaced Varini’s landmark book Silenzi (2008). His first solo exhibition at Fotografia Europea 2009 established his reputation, followed by invitations to Arles, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo. In 2016, a retrospective of 170 works at the Chiostri di San Domenico (Reggio Emilia, Italy) consecrated his career. Varini pursues a singular body of work, at the crossroads of contemplative photography and painting, acclaimed for its depth and sensitivity.
More information
View Riccardo Varini’s biography, video interview and portfolio on the Artistics website
