51 works · 2003 – 2026
Works on view
The itinerary crosses five sections and more than twenty years of painting. Tap a work to see it full screen, or filter by section.
Section I
Romagna
Nardi’s bond with this land is rooted in his childhood, in the years spent with his grandparents in the Romagna countryside, among visits to relatives living in these hills and fields. The places he walked through as a child are the ones that return today onto the canvas, with the same fidelity with which they remained in his memory: it is no surprise to find, among the titles of these works, villages and houses that still seem to hold the echo of those days.
From this bond comes an intimate way of inhabiting the world, in which the land is not only a landscape to be painted but a refuge to return to. The heart of Romagna is captured in its most sincere dimension: endless countryside, the profile of ancient villages, the stillness of lakes and the geometry of golden fields become, under palette knife and brush, the setting of a painting that celebrates the silent stability of the rural world.
Section II
The Time of Awakening
Before the day truly begins, the artist is already awake, in the silence that precedes everything. He could choose to sleep on, to postpone the start of the day, but he prefers to steal that time from sleep in order to savour the moment when everything is about to begin: the suspended peace before the rush of the hours, the light growing slowly, the world still for an instant before it stirs. It is perhaps from this daily attention to waking that the need arises to paint the rebirth of nature, to fix on canvas the same wonder he lives with his own eyes each morning.
There are moments when nature seems to hold its breath, an instant before everything starts again: the exact point at which the morning light takes shape and the earth opens onto a new day, or onto the return of a new season. Before the branches of an almond tree or the flowering hills of Bertinoro, one feels the full emotion of the miracle of awakening. Here the painting becomes free, fresh, almost driven by an affectionate urgency: brush and palette knife do not chase the precision of drawing but seek the soul of colour, the freshness of a pure impression, turning the fragility of a passing instant into something that goes on blossoming long after the season has ended.
Section III
The Time of Return
Nardi’s bond with this sea begins early, at seventeen, when he starts spending time in Cesenatico, a welcoming town on the Romagna coast. It is here that the deep relationship with water and light takes root, never to leave him again: a bond so strong that at twenty-four he settles here for good, putting down roots in the town he has never left since. His work often takes him around Italy, several days a week away from home, but it is always here, before his sea, that he finds peace and no longer feels the need to go anywhere else.
From the quays of the Cesenatico canal port to the wild, unspoilt charm of the Bassona, the painting becomes a mirror of a shared everyday life — that of someone who knows these places not as a tourist but as one who always comes back, in every season. There is no academy in these seascapes, only the deep desire to capture the salt in the air, the light bouncing off the water, or the small poetry of a kite challenging the wind. Through free fields of colour and a palette that can turn now scorching, now silver, each canvas becomes an affective diary: the memory of a distant summer or the quiet of an afternoon facing the infinite, held forever by the memory of light.
Section IV
The Time of Silence
There is one colour that brings the painter straight back to calm: the white of snow. It is not a landscape that belongs to him by habit — living near the sea, he rarely meets snow — but perhaps for that very reason it strikes him every time with the same force: that muffled silence, that stillness which suspends all noise, gives him back a time different from the one of his days.
Winter takes hold of things with an almost sacred form of respect: the earth sheds its brightest colours to welcome white, and the snow-covered landscape ceases to be a mere season and becomes a metaphor for inner purity, a moment of recollection in which a cold, crystalline light redefines the volumes of the rural world. Between the proud isolation of a solitary tree and the wonder of a field caught suddenly under snow, the painting here learns to work by subtraction: there is no gloomy solitude, but an immense peace — the same that keeps Nardi standing for hours before the white, when everyone else would already have gone back into the warmth. The gold that kindles the frozen morning and the reflections vibrating on the ice tell, in dense fields of colour, the exact instant in which nature itself comes to a halt.
Section V
The Time of the Other
Those who know Nardi know how readily he gives himself to others, while still guarding a time entirely his own, a silent space in which painting becomes company enough in itself. Perhaps this is why the figure of the other made its way into his work only after a long journey through landscapes and silences: as if to say that one can truly meet the other only after learning to be at ease with oneself, and that this gaze towards human presence finally closes the circle of a search that always starts from within.
The painting then draws near, almost confidential, approaching human presence, the smallest gestures and the deep feelings that accompany them: encounter, the wonder of motherhood, the suspension of waiting, the intimacy of rest. The body is never displayed but revealed through the study of light, from forms surfacing in soft half-light to bodies giving themselves over to abandon, up to the nude that resolves itself into pure chromatic and musical chords. The application of colour, dense and immediate, gives up anatomical detail in order to capture the vibration of skin and the energy of a relationship. A gesture, a glance, a body in half-light are enough to tell how the other, in the end, is part of the same inner landscape.
No works in this selection.