This work, which I started many years ago, includes sobre, almost minimalist images, but my main intention is not so much to describe the place but rather to call to poetry and meditation through the use of delicate colours and soft light. My geography, like that of Luigi Ghirri, is a sentimental one, an evocative moment, which I then represented with more pictorialism but without altering the initial image. The form comes to me, but the ultimate purpose is to introduce poetry. In that sense, maybe, I think that the image can remain “eternal”. An image that does not refer to any precise moment, and that can talk at any time. (Riccardo Varini)

Riccardo Varini was born in Reggio Emilia in 1957, where he lives and works. His love for nature and for simple things has been handed down on to him from his father Luigi, a very sensitive person with whom he spends long afternoons on the river Po. He devotes himself to fine art photography after meeting Luigi Ghirri in 1984, the Master of landscape and of the photography “of concept”, but he does not forget the lines, the light colours and the sobriety of Gino Gandini’s art, a painter of his own country belonging to the Morandi’s school. From these two sources springs his own rarefied style, marked by the absence of noise and “aimed at poetry”, as he says. After several exhibitions, he opens the first art photo-gallery in his town in 2006. It soon becomes a meeting point for lots of photographers. Here he also teaches classes of photo-composition. He collaborates with the Tourism Board, but it is in 2007 that Prof. Arturo Carlo Quintavalle praises his works and invites him to place them in the archives of CSAC in Parma, where many Italian big names are also hosted. In 2008 he is invited to exhibit in France, in Paris and in Nantes, and to hold a series of seminaries at the IULM University of Milan. Recently he has been devoting himself to  “rooms” and urban landscapes inspired by the famous American painter Edward Hopper’s sets.