In My Own Time
The Memory of Light

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.

In this carved-out space, time stops being filled like a duty or something that must necessarily follow a logic, and turns into a light ready to bring spaces and moments into relief. Colour settles into the geometry of golden fields, reflects on the damp quays of harbours, hides behind a field of paint that seems born of instinct: each painting fixes a fragment of lived experience and, at the same time, leaves it free to vibrate, like an echo that keeps resonating in the mind of the viewer. Painting thus becomes a meditation on the persistence of beauty and on its capacity to return in ever different, yet always necessary, forms. Without that gaze there would be no life.

The five sections that make up the itinerary — Romagna, The Time of Awakening, The Time of Return, The Time of Silence and The Time of the Other — are as many stages of this inner journey: the place of childhood, the rebirth of nature, landfall at the home sea, the suspension of snow, the encounter with the human figure. Each tells a different way of taking one’s own time, of stopping to look instead of being dragged along by the present.

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.

At the end of the eighteenth century the Napoleonic army requisitioned it, marking a further chapter in the long life of the fortress. Today the building houses the Town Hall, the Archaeological Museum, the Verdi cinema-theatre and the “Mario Bertozzi” exhibition hall, the venue of this exhibition.

Every stone, every corner of this ancient structure breathes history and culture, inviting visitors to explore its depths and to be captivated by the timeless beauty that only history and art can evoke.