LE BAL pays tribute to Guido Guidi, a key figure in European photography. Since the 1960s, his reflection on the language of the image has given rise to one of the most striking poetics of the gaze of our time, embodied for the first time at LE BAL in eighteen photographic sequences conceived by the artist, in collaboration with the MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo in Rome.
Guido Guidi, born in Italy in 1941, belongs to a generation of artists who profoundly transformed the relationship between photographic language and the perception of territory. His attention falls as much on fragments of ordinary landscapes seemingly without distinction in Romagna, the region where he has always lived, as on emblematic works by major figures of architecture. By granting equal importance to the banal and the monumental, to neglected details as to established forms, he gradually asserted a radical position, to the point of being recognized today by his peers as a reference point in the history of the medium.
For Guidi, “the relationship with what we look at, the performance of the encounter, is essential.” Exploring this relationship also means considering photography as a “note,” a humble “scribble,” an “attempt.” He thus asserts his rejection of any complacency toward the single image and the perfect work. For him, to “resolve” an image is to attempt to reconcile, at once, a reflection on the primacy of the experience of seeing, on the specificity of the medium that records it, and on the passing of time. He explains: “I think of photography as a process of knowledge I don’t believe in definitive result there are only stages.” Through daily photographs, neither strictly typological nor serial, a poetic archive of the territory gradually takes shape: an accumulation of viewpoints, variations and discoveries, comings and goings, repetitions, chance and insistence, far from any pursuit of artifice or virtuosity.
The photographic sequences in the exhibition unfold as a continuous line of more than two hundred images. They trace the full span of Guidi’s work, from his black-and-white experiments of the 1960s and 1970s to his subsequent research on landscape and architecture, and on to his most recent projects. Notebooks, manuscripts, maquettes and unpublished documents shed light on certain aspects of his method. Punctuated by the photographs and the intervals that separate them, the exhibition path with its rigor and the subtlety of its variations invites us into the “photographic” heart of Guidi’s thinking, its artistic density and the beauty of its unfolding.
Curators: Simona Antonacci, Pippo Ciorra and Antonello Frongia.
Guido Guidi : Col tempo, 1956-2024
20 February – 24 May 2026
LE BAL
6 Imp. de la Défense
75018 Paris, France
www.le-bal.fr
