COMING SOON

Rodney Smith’s photography, between wonder and measure

Palazzo Roverella presents a refined retrospective dedicated to one of the great masters of contemporary photography: Rodney Smith. His images, impeccable in composition and full of poetry and irony, transport the viewer to worlds suspended between reality and imagination. A visual journey through perfect proportions, surreal lightness and delicate harmonies, which reveals Smith’s ability to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

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PERMANENT EXHIBITION

The Pinacoteca

A fascinating journey through four centuries (15th through 18th) of masterpieces and a stunning 22 meters diorama dating back to the 19th century. Part of the city’s most prestigious collection.

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Continue your experience at Palazzo Roncale, just a few steps from Palazzo Roverella.

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Time, Light and Permanence

Rodney Smith, Caroline at the Top of Circular Staircase, Charleston, South Carolina, 2000

There are few traces of the passage of time in Smith’s photographs: no shadows to indicate the hours, no clues to deduce the seasons, the years, even the century.

Everything is carefully obliterated, like the steps that lead to a secret place that cannot be returned to, since every trace has been covered. Only Smith knows how to access it, since this place belongs to him. It was he, like a divine geometer, who drew its contours. In this place, the sun is always at midday, at its solstice: there is no shadow cast to attest to the reality of what one sees, since an object without a shadow does not exist. Here, day does not rejoin night, night will no longer spill over into the next morning – everything is crystallized like a sliver of light stuck forever in the permanence of the world. Time is an invention of human beings, eternity belongs to the divine. Each image of Smith takes us back to a lost paradise where white light reigns supreme.

Passages

 Rodney Smith, Caroline silhouette no.1, Ashley Hall, South Carolina, 2000

Places of passage, thresholds, borders and frontiers that flow into a beyond, an elsewhere, a silent whiteness. Smith’s images are places of transition, almost of transubstantiation, where inside and outside meet at one point: that of the image, of the flashing light, of the explosion.

These passages together form an underground gallery in which Smith precedes us and guides us, but it is up to us to choose the destination of this nocturnal journey. Images like arrows shot through the centuries, tear the human sky and open onto an ancestral night of remote times. If painting is a “mental thing”, as Leonardo da Vinci said, Smith demonstrates to what extent art draws inspiration from the Platonic idea that precedes it.