The Srisa Gallery in Florence is hosting Doveva essere qui? (“Was It Supposed to Be Here?”), the latest solo exhibition by Gabriele Landi, curated by Federico Giannini, running from 24 September to 28 October 2026. At the heart of the show — which presents a nucleus of new works by the Ligurian artist — stands an unprecedented monumental piece: the painted and carved map of a place that does not exist. This work grew out of a process begun by the artist in late September 2025 and pursued over many months, until it became one of the most demanding undertakings of his recent practice, which centres on abstract and imaginary geographies that come to life in the form of carved charts.
The title, as Landi himself recounts, is not a choice but an encounter: “You don’t choose a title, you meet it — or you don’t. It simply happens, as is only natural.” The very substance of which the works are made — an extraordinarily dense weave of tiny paper squares, at once present and absent, painted on both sides with multiple layers of colour — carries within itself the same ambivalence: on the one hand a consistency that the artist himself finds almost erotic, exuberant, effervescent; on the other, its exact opposite — disintegration, decay, the progressive emptying out of matter itself.
Everything originated from a precise need: after nearly a year of working on small formats, Landi felt the urge for the monumental scale. He set to work on a roll of watercolour paper ten metres long and 1.40 metres high, divided it into four equal sections and painted it on both sides — laying the sheets out on the floor of his studio and drawing, in fluorescent colours on the reverse of each sheet, forms that reminded him of a map. The result is a composition with a total size of 250 x 560 cm. Once this first phase was complete, the artist moved his workbench back near the studio entrance and began tracing, on the reverse of each sheet, the dense grid of lines that would guide his cuts: squares 0.7 mm across, separated by a webbing 2 mm thick. Given the size of the sheets, Landi had to work by unrolling them a few centimetres at a time, cutting each individual square freehand — first vertically, then horizontally, one after another, with a small sharp blade. The guiding idea was clear from the outset: to completely empty the grid in the spots where no forms had been painted, and instead leave scraps of paper where islands, peninsulas and promontories had been painted — with the intent of drawing the map of a non-existent place that could only be traversed with the imagination.
Gabriele Landi: “I like that the title of the exhibition is a question, and that this question has no answer — that it evokes doubt and leaves room for uncertainty, like a missed appointment: was it supposed to be here? I find that the short-circuit created between a title evoking absence, the uncertainty of being in the wrong place, and the fact that the work I am presenting in this show is the map of a non-existent place amplifies in itself a paradoxical dimension that seems to set us before our most steadfast uncertainties. The matter composing this image — made simultaneously of the presence and absence of an infinity of tiny paper squares and of the various layers of paint with which I painted them front and back — on the one hand has an erotic consistency born of irrepressible, effervescent exuberance; on the other, it evokes its exact opposite: disintegration and decay.”
Federico Giannini: “Gabriele Landi’s new work introduces us to the cartography of an elsewhere with vague contours — a cartography that disorients, that offers no compasses and no cardinal points, but merely administers uncertainties, evoking doubts, vagueness, suspension. It is the most recent chapter of a practice that continues to explore the borders between painting and sculpture, between figuration and abstraction, between presence and absence, with a lightness that has nothing to do with weight and everything to do with the delicate intensity of a way of proceeding that manages to be, at one and the same time, writing and weaving, carving and painting, drawing and sculpture — and that invites the eye to return again and again to what it believes it has already seen. These new works, substantial and fragile, gestural and mental, are the fruit of a slow and precise unmaking, accustomed to advancing with a repetitiveness closer to ritual than to seriality; they are open structures that unfold onto the infinite possibilities of the empty set. The idea, in the end, is that in Gabriele Landi’s invented maps every visitor may find his or her own geography.”
Photo credits: Srisa Gallery
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