Dominic Ruiu
Mountains and forests of Sardinia
9 November to 31 December 2025
Critique sheet
The exhibition Mountains and Forests of Sardinia is a journey through the island’s mountain landscapes and forests, where the power of nature meets the author’s poetic and scientific gaze. For over fifty years, naturalist Domenico Ruiu has been capturing with his camera the soul of Sardinia, its uncontaminated nature, its ancient reliefs sculpted by the millennial action of water and wind. Landscapes of rare and wild beauty where species that only belong to this island live. His photographs render the majesty of mouflons and deer, the grace of martens and the primordial force of landscapes, with a style that combines documentary precision and visual lyricism.
Nature, for Ruiu, is a mosaic of shapes and colours – the green of forests, the grey of limestone fading into the blue of the sea, the bare roots and wrinkled bark of centuries-old trees, the meal of an eagle or its flight through the clouds – and photography a way of saying that beauty is not conquered, it is protected. ‘Man belongs to nature, not the other way around’ he is wont to say, and in this conviction lies the deepest root of his ethical and responsible work.
His images are the story of an inner time, the diary of a life spent in the woods, amidst wind, light and expectation. Every animal portrayed is a fragment of memory, an unrepeatable encounter. Each photo the instant in which life reveals itself in its continuity, a breath shared between man and landscape, between man and nature.
Domenico Ruiu invites us to see with slower eyes, to recognise in the landscape, in the light reflected in a pool of water, in the silent flight of an eagle, the possibility of a profound coexistence with nature. The mountain, says Ruiu, is a school of slowness: it teaches one to measure oneself against time and oneself.
A slow time, made up of waiting and silence, where the sky, the mountain, the forest and the animal become a single image: a shared breath, a different way of inhabiting the world.
Biography
Domenico Ruiu is one of the most important naturalist photographers and writers on the national scene. He collaborates with online sites, magazines, newspapers and TV on environmental issues. For the ‘high scientific merits’ of his activity, the University of Sassari awarded him the ‘Laurea Magistrale ad Honorem’ in 2014. In 2015, he was awarded the national prize Premio Le Gru as Master of Nature Photography. He is the only nature photographer in the Alidem International Gallery – The Art of Photography (Milan). He is the author of numerous publications and series on the environment and fauna of Sardinia, including the large-format photographic volume ‘Il fotografo dei rapaci’ (four languages, including Sardinian), one of the few collector’s books on environmental themes published in Europe. In recent years, he has produced a trilogy of volumes on Sardinia’s nature for the Nuoro-based publishing house ILISSO: ‘Mountains and Forests of Sardinia’; ‘Animals of Sardinia – Mammals, Amphibians and Reptiles’; ‘Animals of Sardinia – Birds in their Natural Environment’; in 2025, he edited the 7-volume series ‘The Protagonists of Nature’ for ILISSO.
Photographs
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