Villa Firriato

“The Universe is my rest. The Universe is my idleness”; “the Universe is the infinity of my inattention”, says Bachelard, drawing the line that separates reverie, or dreaming, from science. For the French epistemologist, taking in the whole at once, contemplating the landscape, surveying the panorama, is an attitude of complete mental passivity: a form of hypnosis that prevents us from observing detail and arrests the drive towards knowledge. Drawing on an epistemological insight to enter into the spirit of an artistic enquiry may seem arbitrary and illegitimate, both for science and for art. Yet it is the most fruitful approach, though certainly not the only one, to the photographs that Ezio Ferreri, continuing his dialogue with villas, has devoted to Villa Firriato. Ferreri’s lens has broken the subject down into forty images which, rejecting the panorama and magnifying detail, offer themselves as a remedy for inattention, a training of the eye and a stimulus to thought. As a coherent work, they do more than show us Villa Firriato: they enable us to know it. Yet they never become a sterile inventory of facts, for the villa’s aesthetic qualities remain legible in every detail. The villa is a cultural topos: a theatrical microcosm charged with representing a conception of life that is itself a projection of desire. Nothing could be further from today’s prevailing outlook, in which the villa can exist only as “real estate”.

Diego Guadagnino