Directions Without Ground finds landscape signs still present but stripped of their authority to guide.

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I see the landscape as a symbolic space: the signs intended to guide, organise, and make it readable are still present, but they no longer hold complete authority. While direction is suggested, promised, or even enforced, the actual destination remains uncertain.

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While direction is suggested, promised, or even enforced, the actual destination remains uncertain.

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Through essential compositions and wide areas of visual silence, abstraction emerges through subtraction. I look for images where the landscape, moulded by erosion and the passage of time, contrasts with the rigid language of human symbols; within this tension, what is intended to guide no longer aligns with what is actually seen.

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I introduce chromatic alterations that act as emotional traces, intervening in perception rather than in the material itself. The territory is no longer merely geography; it opens onto a mental dimension. The images become fragments of a condition in which orientation remains a promise, yet is never fully realised. It is within this gap that the need for direction emerges — and, at times, the impossibility of truly following it.

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About

Francesco Pace Rizzi is an Italian photographer working on mid- to long-term projects focused on the relationship between perception and space, through an essential visual language.

In some series, he uses abstraction as a working method, through processes of subtraction and minimal compositions, building images in which the landscape opens up to a more perceptual than descriptive dimension.

He has participated in international exhibitions and competitions, receiving several awards and placing among the winners of the BIFA, TIFA, and ND Photography Awards. In 2023, he received the FIAF distinction "Artist of Italian Photography".