American West Icons

Comparing one's own territory ("Italian far east," according to a happy definition) with one as geographically distant as California, Arizona and the far North American West, during several visits, renewed my curiosity of discovery, exploration, knowledge.

There I saw all the movies, all the dust, all the light, the years of waiting, the places imagined and experienced in books, in catalogs, the recurring dreams of the Elsewhere, of the myth of the Road. 

I saw the free and unobstructed horizons, the serene, limitless ones, and the dazzling, bright ones of a different light. The deep skies and the rarefied ones. The desert, the real one, the one of bushes and snakes, where man darts swiftly, looking for the next town, and that of the town itself, the man-made one where the sand is now concrete, the one that one would like to cross swiftly but traps in traffic, in asphalt, in the boundless snake of steel horses.

It is in this West that I have sought landscapes different from those always experienced, different in that they are far away, but not unexpected, but desired, evoked, finally true. Landscapes of man even when far from the megalopolis, for everywhere man has come. Landscapes and inhabited places far from the thousand lights, close to those borderless horizons, where the taste of the frontier, of freedom, of faded celluloid, is still there.

Places that tell of times not so far away, yet already buried by dust, already pockmarked by the Sun, where man's objects are silent but proud witnesses of colonization. Objects that tell of the present and speak to us of Beauty even when derelict, when lonely, when simple and everyday. Common and yet extraordinary.