Friuli Venezia Giulia, territory of contrasts, is the object of the story by Nicola Toffolini who has chosen water as the main theme to delineate the boundaries and itineraries of his region: by means of this element that models and is modelled, a landscape takes shape and is continuously transformed through natural and anthropic occurrences, in the attempt to capture the elusive complexity of the natural, a private ‘mental map’ that reflects the relationship with one’s environment. What attracts Toffolini are the powerful architectures tied to the utopias of modernism: this fascinating terribilita is yielded in drawings, completed by the poetic texts of the Friulian artist Eva Geatti who presses past the visual via poetry with a potent, evocative, and lunar physical presence. The lines
of the drawings delineate fragile and violent horizons marked by the forms that water takes on as it expands onto the plains of Friuli, filling basins, transforming the earth even when it becomes invisible, swallowed inside the cavities of the Triestine Karst. The sublime that the artist grasps in viaducts, water towers, and dams acquires a symbolic state in ‘utopian landscapes’: gigantic molochs are grafted onto the arid setting that welcomes them, projecting the shadow of the present onto a shore of the future.