07/05/2026
“The body as threshold”
Perhaps youth is only this: “to love the senses endlessly and never repent.” The quotation from Sandro Penna is not merely a poetic homage, but the key to entering a visual investigation in which the body ceases to be an object and becomes instead a limit, a passage, a threshold. In this series, Matteo Piacenti explores youth not as an age-related condition, but as an ontological state of tension: the moment in which identity is still fluid, incandescent matter defining itself through contact, shadow, and the gaze of the other.
Photography here does not document, but rather engraves upon skin and space a narrative composed of stark contrasts and sudden delicacies. Through a poetics of fragmentation, the works operate metonymically, renouncing the wholeness of the subject in search of the universal detail.
The gaze loses itself in the intertwining of bodies, where the boundary between self and other dissolves into an architecture of muscles and breaths; it rediscovers itself in nature, conceived as a mirror in which skin merges with vegetation, suggesting a return to a primordial dimension; and finally it confronts shadow and mark, geometric projections that redraw the face, transforming physiognomy into a map of desires and inquietudes.
Piacenti’s black and white is rigorous, almost sculptural, yet at the same time pulsating with life. One perceives a secular sacredness in the way the lens lingers over nudity, stripped of all vulgarity and restored to its truth.
