ERIBERTO GUIDI – How one can be regenerated by a landscape and how one may feel tied to one’s own land, folksmen and countries by a ray of poetry.

Eriberto Guidi starded photograph more than twenty years ago. He trained as a photographer by following rationally the continuous flows of his mind and culture; his first images were rich in facts and colours as if they were direct documents and they were submitted, at once, to his intellectual and poetic judgement. In some of his analyses different elements came together, as for example certain rules derived from his great love for music and painting.
Guidi felt the need to give his own images an absolute pureness of hues and to arrange them in an armonious, clear way. After his first attempts, Guidi starts observe and photograph lands and landscapes surrounding Fermo, and he is at once attracted by ploughed fields, hills, gullies and valleys spotted with light and shade (the director Crispolti shot a filmed sequence about these photos, broadcasted by the Third Channel of the RAI). He is softly absorbed by the beauty of this land, by the signs of human beings which charm him more and more; he lives, or seems to, in communion with the land represented in his photos and in which he identifies himself.
Now such images have the pureness and the exact “framing” he was looking for; that’s why his photos are published by the magazine LIFE.
Miraculously, now he is able to reach a poetic vision of the reality he represents: people, buildings, or the roads of a town. According to his new poetic vision, he has represented towns as: Fermo, Ascoli Piceno ( report published by the “New Times” of Moscov ), Gubbio, Spoleto and Venice where images seem to harmonize and to look for each other naturally and spontaneously, so that to constitute a tale evolving over time.
The tale entitled “The novice” is equally important with regard to the conflict-harmony between the girl’s face and the images of her land she parted from, to join the nunnery; worth remembering is also the novel “Homer from Elcito” which is a poetic report about a hardly uninhabited village placed in the mountain district of Macerata, as well as the reports entitled “The village of the single mothers” and “Moscow 1977”.
His one man shows both in Italy and abroad, his publications, as well as his exhibitions are numerous. Guidi still goes on carrying out ever more refined images and ever more harmonized, narrative compositions of images.
I would briefly go bask to the tale “The novice” with regard to the girl’s face: in Guidi’s works, indeed, portraits are very important and his great care over this aspect is the result of his continuous studies and researches.
Beth the faces and the human forms he portraits are nearly always very meaningful and espressive, so that to allow the observer to understand the position, anxieties, dreams and story of the people portrayed.

August 1980

Luigi Crocenzi

Luigi Dania

Luigi Dania

Well-read, reserved, introvert, Eriberto Guidi through his photos, well-known abroad, entrust ns a world rich in expressive, vivid tension and deep spirituality, in which imagination and dream-like atmosphere are melted. In the late fifties, he approached Neorealism, took part in numerous exhibitions and worked out both report and photographic relations of rare intensity as those published in the last three editions of the prestigious magazine “LIFE”. After further investigations appeared in his Frederick’s Puglia memory book “TERRE BRUCIATE”, he began preparing illustrated books about Fermo, where he was born, (‘A town which is something more than a town’), atout Ascoli Piceno which he calls ‘fantastic and mysterious’ and where he is awarded the Friendship Prize, and lastly about Gubbio, fancifully looked into through its ancient stoncs. In the early nineties, he gave fully extent to his deep neoromantic vein through magic views of Venice, an imaginary city, as he himself states: views which seem to bring back to life the pages by James and Thomas Mann, together with a surreal rhythm. After a one man show in New York, sponsored by the ‘ISTITUTO ITALIANO DI CULTURA’ in 1999 at Uma Gallery, Guidi, in the present year came back to the States for another one man show called ‘Campi Quadrati-Square Fields’ organized by the Hillwood Art Museum of Long Island University, in which he presented some of his photos relating to his ceaseless and timeless wanderings through the Marches’ countryside looked at with great attention by several american students.

Mr. Denis Curtis states, in his introduction to the catalogne of the show supervised with care by Sadya Zampaloni, : ‘What struck me mostly, was the feeling I had watching those images which seemed to me to be able to keep in touch with an unusual and keen mankind, often invisible and shifty to a distant eyes. On the other hand each man has his own tastes, criteria and aptitudes. To nature, it makes no matter whether worldly things are named in the right way or not’. It’s not to be forgotten, as Hans Biedermann underlines, that: ‘The square is the geometrical symbol which perfectly embodies the direction of man both within the universe and within life, according to a vision of the world as a whole divided into parts ruled by supernatural beings.’ Guidi points out his attention, now on waste and lonely lands, now on fertile ones characterized by changeful intervals. He sketches out light-intense germinations, creates new perspectives according to his, new need for essentiality, among slopes looming up beyond rowed, grass layers and arboreal bushes. He dwells upon the rows of vines winding up the hill in a regular movement, on trees which suddenly seem to disappear hit by sudden gusts of wind. He lingers over inaccessible corners among deep grooves which slope down to a part of the nocturnal sky; he discovers a luminescent path which nearly turns into a crescent moon. His square fields, represented with an expressive intensity, show both a remote nostalgia, starts and some state of grace: for a full understanding of their deep lyricism, we might be helped by some lines written by Coleridge, or, as in this speecific case, by Byron who wrote: ......... my dwelling is the shadow of the night why doth thy magic torture me with the light.

And also by Shelley:
a sweet and a creeping soud like the rushing of wings was heard around and suddendly the lamps grew pale.


Morcover Guidi seems to be conscious to us of the fact that “The word in its essence is solitude’ as Frank Thiess says. The play of softened, geometric-patterned shades is dominating; his self-portrait, indeed, represents a dark, gloomy shadow among harsh clods whose caption says: ‘To immortalize the essence of daily life makes me think, whilst to immortalize a shadow leads me to the supernatural world.” Always leaning towards a continuous creativity, Guidi is to be placed among the rarest and real masters of our time.