Curated by Damiano Robbiani

Palazzo Reali hosts a monographic exhibition dedicated to the Ticino-born photographer Vincenzo Vicari, active in Lugano between 1936 and 1987. The chronological exhibition presents a careful selection of original prints and reproductions from negatives, constituting a total of over one hundred black-and-white and colour photographs that document the transformation of the region and its inhabitants during the transition from the a still very rural world of the post-war years to the urbanized Ticino of the 1980s. Vicari interpreted and documented the canton of Ticino without censorship: from picture-postcard subjects to more unexpected ones, his eye was never celebratory nor beautifying, but confidently recorded the world around him, only occasionally allowing a touch of irony to shine through. While Vicari’s Ticino may not be the idyllic one sought by literary figures such as Francesco Chiesa, Guido Calgari and Giuseppe Zoppi, or that of the ideology of spiritual Defense and tourist propaganda, neither it is only the Ticino of technical progress and economic success at any cost. Indeed, the importance of Vicari’s work lies in his ability to render and summarize the complexity of an area seeking its identity in a way that is never banal.