12–27 September 2026
In My Own TimeThe Memory of Light
Paintings by Christian Nardi
Christian Nardi, Blossoming in Bertinoro, 2010 — oil on panel
- Dates
- 12 – 27 September 2026Opening Saturday 12 September
- Hours
- 4:00 pm – 6:00 pmEvery day
- Venue
- “Mario Bertozzi” Exhibition HallRocca di Forlimpopoli, Italy
- Works on view
- 51 paintingsFive sections, over twenty years of work
The exhibition
A visual diary of feeling
Painting, when it is born of a sincere necessity, is not charged with reproducing reality: it seizes spaces in which to find oneself and captures them in order to make them its own. Christian Nardi’s is a personal world. His landscapes are like inner mirrors, and the brushstrokes on the canvases speak because they go beyond the silence of their subjects, inviting us into the painter’s sensibility. This exhibition is a visual diary of feeling, told in a sequence that does not follow an academic chronology but adapts to the artist’s own path, crossing more than twenty years of research. The works gathered here belong to different seasons and moments of Nardi’s life, yet they share the same need: to give nature and the human figure a space in which to be noticed again and reworked in the light of a new meaning — his meaning.
Behind every canvas there is a time Nardi took for himself, subtracted from the frantic rhythms of everyday life: a time to stop, to breathe, to look calmly and understand what we normally pass through in a hurry or distractedly. In this recovered time, painting became over the years a way of regenerating himself, before being a craft or a declared vocation.
The itinerary
Five sections, five ways of taking one’s own time
Romagna
The place of childhood
19 works Section II
The Time of Awakening
The rebirth of nature
7 works Section III
The Time of Return
Landfall at the home sea
7 works Section IV
The Time of Silence
The suspension of snow
9 works Section V
The Time of the Other
The encounter with the human figure
9 worksSelection
A few works on view
The artist
“Christian looks, and he knows how to see.”
Carla Agostini
Christian Nardi was born in Cesena in 1969. For years his life ran along the rigorous, structured tracks of a management career, yet inside him a great passion for art always stayed alive. He spent his time studying the revolution of light of the French Impressionists and the earthy, immediate truth of the Italian Macchiaioli. He felt that those patches of colour belonged to him — but for a long time he remained an observer.
The turning point came in 2002. In his hands was Lust for Life, Irving Stone’s celebrated fictionalised biography of Van Gogh. That reading struck him deeply and gave rise to the desire to finally pick up a brush. He no longer wanted to watch others paint: he felt the moment had come to do it himself.
The venue
The Rocca of Forlimpopoli
Immersed in the evocative atmosphere of Romagna, the Rocca of Forlimpopoli stands as an imposing testimony to the Renaissance military past, able to enchant the eyes and spirits of those who visit it. Skilfully built around 1361 on the ruins of the ancient cathedral — destroyed by the papal troops of Cardinal Albornoz — the fortress has crossed centuries of history as a silent witness to different eras and dominations.
Reinforced and enlarged over the centuries by the Ordelaffi, lords of the city, the Rocca appears today in all its majestic solidity, characterised by four powerful corner towers and a curtain wall overlooking a wide moat, evidence of its strategic role of defence and territorial control. Its mighty walls tell stories of rule and power, spanning the periods under the Riario-Sforza, Cesare Borgia, the Rangoni and the Zampeschi families.
