It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key note, the standard of scale and the chief organ of sentiment. … The sky is the source of light in Nature, and govern everything.

(John Constable, 1821)

A photographer and an exhibition on landscape. But also much more, on a theoretical and personal level. Landscape, as is known, has a privileged status in photography: it is a widespread, versatile theme, multifaceted in a quantity of interpretations and figurations - from the territory to the habitat, from nature to anthropization, from documentation to metaphor, from stereotype to symbol. Because landscape photography is always a portion of the world that refers to a relationship between human beings and nature, necessarily involving cultural, ethical and political issues - especially today with the awareness of the problems of the environment, resources and climate.

Toni Garbasso chooses to deal with it in the framework of 5 different points of view, or as he calls them, "5 variations on the theme of the landscape":

* Spherical Nature (the all-encompassing vision)
* Venetian Light (the sky above the landscape)
* Sea Matter (a landscape seen in its detail)
* Denied Landscape
* In Human Form

In these five points, the near and the far, the inside and the outside, the visionary and the descriptive, the minimal and the immense, details and horizons, fictions and disguises interact.
But above all, they correspond to a choice of field, because they indicate that the landscape is not considered a single and well-defined whole but on the contrary is a presence to be investigated, a mobile, symbolic, transforming fact (and concept).
There are many landscapes and many variations of his images because photography is a gaze - a way of looking - that always adds and takes away something.

Toni Garbasso is well aware of this and works as if he were doing research, studying and accumulating visual data, according to the principle of a seriality conceived as the proposal of choice between variants and correspondences, beyond the single photo.

The central paradigm of his photographic gaze is space, a theme, if it can be defined as such, studied at length during his professional activity and now turned towards nature. Space as a dimension to explore, expanding its boundaries and multiplying them as in particular in the panoramic photographs: photographs in which the vision expands along a spherical perspective, following the model of the 360-degree pictorial spectacles that in the 19th century transported spectators illusionistically to different places and times.

But, above all, the space that is the protagonist of Garbasso's photographs is that of the places where he was formed and lives, accumulating personal experiences and memories: like the plains flooded with light, or like the travel notes in which nature and monuments coexist with anthropic barriers - fences, cars but also tables of tourist groups.
Space that is sometimes compressed into the details of objects, shapes and colors that smell of the sea, evidence of tools that are used and worn out, and that become metaphysical agglomerates of shining colors; or space that chases the game of a paradox chasing and inventing the shapes of anthropomorphic plants.
And here the circle between expansion and contraction, between the immense horizon and the close and minimal detail, closes - for now.

Toni Garbasso's research is complicated because it is also a search for beauty.
The majestic and ineffable beauty of nature that in our feelings has been modeled on the canons of painting starting from the myth of Claude Lorrain who, as it is written on his tombstone, was the first painter to know how to paint the light of the sun.
And then focusing over time on other insights and other references so much so as to make the notion of beauty a frontier area of ​​art and in general of the image.

Garbasso is well aware that today the too beautiful beauty of sunsets and skies is a research out of time, out of fashion and out of register, but he also knows well that the "natural" is now confined precisely in sunsets and skies, in that fascinating light that for years he has tried to capture with photography in the peculiar scenarios of Luce Veneta.
"Luce Veneta - Toni once told me - is the light of Giorgione, Canaletto, Titian, who I was not inspired by, but who bring back certain luminous atmospheres that I recognize in the landscapes I see".
Because - as he specified on another occasion - his is "a research on the beauty of the territory, in its various declinations, starting from the primordial elements, the sky, the earth, the water up to its aesthetic and structural contradictions."

As is very evident, at the basis of these observations lies the desire to discover, preserve, share. This exhibition, so full of brightness and colors, finally leads to the discovery of the other side of a shadow zone in which questions are formulated about the landscape, about photography and about the meaning that belongs to them.

How do we look at the landscape today? and how can we tell it with photography? What are the relationships between representation and image?

Silvia Bordini