Billboards

Choosing a precise category of subjects within a marginal landscape and using a rough, essential and synthetic language, in the photographic series Billboards Maurizio Montagna works on a lack: the space left free on the billboards of advertising communications. Roberta Valtorta writes: "Maurizio Montagna’s is direct photography, it is the photograph of the 'true' things, that is those that are in front of the eyes and in front of the machine, that have nothing to do with the dimension of digital intervention. Yet, in our contemporaneity in which photographs are turning into images, we can not help but think that it could be a digital procedure, of electronic deletions. These boxes waiting for a speech in a sense refer to the canvases that Lucio Fontana decided to hit with one, two, many cuts, the monochrome Yves Klein, the fields of Mark Rothko, Mondrian himself. There is therefore an abstract component in these photographs of imprint instead frankly documentary. Their realist soul is made conversely feel in a simple and clear, and speaks to us with evidence of these mute structures and also of the landscape. The empty billboards are guides to the landscape, pretexts to look at the landscape. So, from one photograph to another, we see apartment buildings, cars, motorcycles, street furniture, walls, public green, snow, scattered houses, bushes residential and productive architectures, and every other element that makes up the urban fabric.".