La ‘janna a lianti
(the east-facing door)

An internal point of view, as an autochthonous person, therefore, on the one hand facilitated by familiarity with these places, the people who live and work there, a clear idea of the strong and indispensable elements of the landscape, and also the not taken for granted ability to know how to cover a territory as vast as it is fragmented. But on the other hand, the very fact of dealing with one’s own land and people is a pitfall that could mislead the artist, leading him to take on the need for redemption and revenge of a decaying culture, perhaps by aestheticising architecture, objects, faces and landscapes, or even by slipping on the picturesqueness and superficiality of a postcard Sardinia. Nanni Angeli does not fall for this and manages to make the most of his indigenous gaze to capture the real landscape in all its complexity.

So his is also an objective, disenchanted point of view. There is not only the life, but also the death of the stazzo. But they are like two moments of the same breath: they cannot be separated, on pain of apnoea. In fact, there are no idyllic photos alternating with photos of decay: in each snapshot, the Gallurese countryside blooms and withers: water heals the wounds of the granite quarries; terracotta stands next to plastic; in a room ravaged by time, the warmth of traces of life persists; in a man’s solitude, the red of flowers; scrap iron consoled by the green of the lawn; the smile and shadow in the faces of the elderly; a precious decoration on a chipped plaster…

Here, in Nanni Angeli’s images there is no black and ghostly death looming over the colours of life, but rather a sense of ineluctable and peaceful transience that blows over the rust and flows through the cracks and wrinkles. In this sense the gaze is profound: the symbolism is not banal, the emotions are contrasting, layered and co-present. There is no minimalism: elements and trajectories abound that unite them, hold them together, make them resist with and against the inexorably changing world. Light plays an important role in this: it rips through, floods, gives depth, enlivens, does not drive out ghosts but at least renders them harmless.

So much so that even the great spectre seems to be slowing its inexorable march.

And this is perhaps the most decisive manifestation of Nanni Angeli’s loving point of view. With his skilful use of light, his objective and profound gaze, his attention to the density of the real landscape, his choice of people and contexts to portray, the artist bears witness to and redeems the culture of the stazzi, accepting it for what it is in the early 2000s, showing it to us in its intimate and intrinsic dignity. By loving it, and by ensuring that this love pervades every image, even the most apparently melancholic, and arouses in those who have the privilege of observing it the desire to be there, to be nourished by a culture that in some way continues to live and for this reason continues to need men and women to care for it.