Paolo Simonazzi

PAOLO SIMONAZZI (1961) lives and works in Reggio Emilia. He has published several photo books, exhibited his work in solo and group shows, both in Italy and abroad, and participated in renowned photography festivals; some of his photographs can be found in important museums, institutions and private collections. His style reveals a tender yet irreverent gaze, mostly directed towards the provincial areas where the real and the surreal blur imperceptibly. He loves capturing paradoxes as the expressive form and main guide of his photography. In this way, the ordinary can become extraordinary.

Il filo e il fiume (The thread and the river, Silvana Editoriale, 2021) is a project that was created between 2013 and 2021, dedicated to the Po River and the lands it runs through: a journey of discovery into the subtle stories of identity bound to the largest Italian river, associated to the image of the thread, a recurring element in the photographs and a metaphor of “territorial sewing”. Il filo e il fiume was presented on display at Palazzo Pigorini in Parma in March 2022, for the official Parma culture capital program 2020 2021.

Mantua, Cuba (Greta’s Books, 2016) is a sentimental look into a small town in the province on the confines of the island of Cuba. It was presented for the first time in the autumn of 2016 in Parma (BAG Gallery) and then in Havana (Galeria Casa de Carmen Montilla), during the XIX Italian culture week in Cuba, in October 2017 it was on show inReggio Emilia (Vicolo Folletto Art Factories), inJuly 2018 in Genova (MuMa), in July 2020 in Cesenatico (Galleria Comunale d’Arte Leonardo Da Vinci), in December 2021 in Mantova (Casa di Rigoletto).

So near, so far (Danilo Montanari, 2018) was on show in the spring of 2016 at the prestigious Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, for the XI edition of the Fotografia Europea festival, dedicated to the Via Emilia Road. It is an original reinterpretation of his main projects which look at his homeland with a view that is complicit, affectionate and ironic at the same time. A selection of these images was subsequently on show in January 2019 at the Lavì! City in Bologna during the Art City event in Artefiera.

In 2015 in Turin, for The Others Art Fair, a preview of the unpublished Icons of Liscio (GuaraldiLAB, 2019) project was on show, inspired by the iconic posters of the dance orchestras in Emilia Romagna. In 2021 the project was on exhibition at the 30th addition of the SI Fest – Savignano Immagini di Savignano sul Rubicone (FC).

The Bell’Italia (Beautiful Italy, Silvana Editoriale, 2014) project, with the three colors of the Italian flag as a pretext for a sentimental voyage along the peninsula, was first presented in Reggio Emilia during the VI edition of Fotografia Europea in 2011. It was then on show in Sydney in the same year then in Melbourne (2012), Tokyo (2014) and Moscow (2016).