When I saw myself I wasn’t there

«e poi, trovandomi assolutamente sprovvisto e vuoto di qualsiasi altra materia mi sono offerto da me a me stesso, come argomento e soggetto».

Michel Montaigne

Emptiness is the beginning of all things. A strange presence, a presence of an absence. A present absence. A taking away that fills. Emptiness as an inexhaustible source of richness, of potential; If the house is the place of the soul and memory, what happens when it collapses?

Presence and memory, time and decay, inversions of meaning and approach are the main pillars of the research that Lorenzo Magistrato has developed starting from the concept of emptiness. When I saw myself I wasn’t there follows the artist's profound interest in the concept of emptiness, exploring themes of time, absence, and rebirth.

The project hints at personal fascinations alongside visions of portraits, landscapes, and compelling delicate details captured with sensitivity, presenting a space for contemplation where it allows the author to tell a story that relates his daily encounters with the questions he has been invested in. When I saw myself I wasn’t there was born in a period between hope and pain. It is my personal experience as a person, in which I confront what I wanted to call emptiness, the poetry in loss, and the incompleteness of memory, rediscovering its value.

Paolo Nocentini