The exhibition Il sospiro della natura – The Perceptive Machine takes shape in a setting where industrial memory meets natural harmony. Hosting Florescu’s photographs are the Conti Vecchi Saltworks in Cagliari, which are transformed into an art space thanks to this initiative, realized in collaboration with FAI – the Italian National Trust – and promoted by the Ministry of Culture and the Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the Metropolitan City of Cagliari and the provinces of Oristano and South Sardinia.
Florescu: “I sought the synthesis of perception.”
The works by Ileana Florescu on display at the Saltworks, located in the Santa Gilla Lagoon, take on the role of perceptive seismographs. The exhibition features twenty large-format photographs (100 x 150 cm), dedicated to a small pond and its surroundings in the Murta Maria area, near Olbia. Each image is not the result of a single shot, but rather a layering of moments, lights, and seasons—born from a prolonged and meditative relationship with the place. The artist explains: “I wasn’t looking for a realistic shot, but for a synthesis of the perception of that landscape in that moment.”
The subtitle, The Perceptive Machine, plays on the Renaissance echo of the “perspective machine”: whereas the camera obscura reduced the world to a system of converging lines, Florescu instead explores the complexity of perception—the vibration of reality as it forms and unravels before the eye.
Each work conveys a sense of suspended breath: still water becomes a mirror, a gust of wind ripples through the reeds, the rhythm of nature imprints itself on the lens like an intimate diary. These are not mere photographs, but visual experiences that question perception itself, inviting the viewer to pause, to breathe with the landscape, and to recognize their own emotional states within it.
A journey through words and images
Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue featuring texts by Pino Corrias, Ileana Florescu, Michael Jakob, Marco Magnifico, Marco Piras Berenger, Monica Stochino, and Lucia Tomasi Tongiorgi, translated into English by Amedeo Ceresa Genet. Words intertwine with images, creating a poetic and critical counterpoint. Corrias describes these landscapes as “instant journeys through passing time, tangled with grass and light within other light,” while Tongiorgi highlights how, in the fusion of naturalistic and abstract elements, the photographs become “maps and perceptual paths of physical intensity.”
Ileana Florescu, Il Sospiro della Natura,
The Perceptive Machine
Hardcover, 26x29 cm, 112 pages
