Bordi di mare (Sea edges)

Only at first glance are Tore’s photographs of seascapes. It is a landscape that has lost its color: not the blues of the sky and water, the whites of the foam, or the play of light along the coast, but a palette of blacks, grays, and highlights permeated by a powerful dramatic tension. For Donatello Tore, black and white is not merely a formal choice. It is the tool through which he reimagines the landscape, stripping it of its immediate recognizability and the allure of color to lead it toward a more suspended and contemplative dimension. The sea loses its color but gains density; the sky becomes a surface traversed by masses, contrasts, sudden openings, and blades of light; boats, shores, and man-made structures emerge as isolated presences within a rarefied space.

Silence plays a part in shaping the narrative as well. By eliminating color, black and white seem to dampen the visual noise and the sounds of the sea: the movement of the waves, the wind, port activities, voices, and the labor of men. What remains is a silent geography of objects and architecture, a world in which every element seems to hold the memory of an action now past.

Beyond this initial visual framework, the subject of the exhibition ceases to be the sea. One of the central themes of Donatello Tore’s research emerges in the images: the process of anthropization of the landscape, understood as the sum of the transformations produced by human presence, labor, and activities on the natural environment.

Human presence, however, appears almost absorbed by the expanse of sky and water and is conveyed above all through its absence: through the objects humans have built, the structures they have used, and the traces they have left along the coast—traces that preserve the memory of a gesture, a task, or a function; every structure bears witness to the attempt to inhabit, use, or traverse a territory that is inherently unstable.

What his photographs depict is a residual, minimal, and silent form of human impact: what remains after humanity has passed through, when activity has ceased, structures have lost their function, and nature has slowly begun to reclaim these places.

Time takes its toll on surfaces, corroding wood and concrete, tilting walkways, disrupting paths, and transforming architectural structures into fragments. The sea advances and recedes, covering and uncovering, depositing materials and erasing boundaries. Nature thus seems to set in motion a process that runs counter to that of human development, gradually engulfing what humans have built and reintegrating it into the landscape.

It is in this relationship between construction and dissolution, permanence and abandonment, that the deepest meaning of the title is defined: the edges of the sea are not merely the geographical margins of the coast, but places of passage, unstable thresholds, and junctures between different elements. It is along these boundaries that land and sea merge; and it is here that man’s fragile creations temporarily alter the natural profile of the coast, introducing foreign geometries, lines, and materials, yet remain exposed to the forces of water, wind, and time. The photographs capture precisely this moment of uncertain equilibrium, when the human trace is still recognizable but has already begun to blend with its surroundings.

Bordi di mare (Sea edges) narrates this slow alternation through still, silent images: presence through absence, movement through suspension, color through its erasure. And it transforms the margin—a seemingly secondary and peripheral place—into the center of a reflection on time, memory, and humanity’s fragile permanence within the landscape.

Alongside the black-and-white sequence, in the exhibition space of the Museo Organica, color returns and introduces a different energy: three large images, again in square format, extend the narrative toward another watery landscape. No longer the open, shifting waters of the sea, but the contained, still waters of Sardinia’s rice paddies: a presence close to the sea and, at the same time, deeply connected to the land and human labor. A new dimension where water is no longer a boundary, a margin, or a force that consumes and restores, but an orderly surface, traversed by light, a vital element of a constructed and cultivated landscape.

These large-scale images do not interrupt the rhythm of black and white but rather reopen it, reintroducing color and suggesting a different possible balance between nature, landscape, and human presence.

– Giannella Demuro