[Lecture] Francesco Cabras: Every Image Is a Landscape — On Portraiture, Myth and the Inner Geography of the Gaze

Francesco Cabras's photographic work appears, at first glance, eclectic: metaphysical landscapes, deteriorating urban icons, apocryphal saints, contemplative portraits. In reality, it is always the same work — the search for that common ground where something ordinary becomes revelation.

Moving between these ecosystems, Cabras seeks in photography a way out of the visible: to sublimate it, to elevate it beyond the given real and suggest an inner elsewhere — without ever severing the thread with the world. The real is always the point of departure, never of arrival. Each image is also a continuous renegotiation with cliché — in particular with the seduction of exoticism — and the pursuit of a recognisable, personal temperature of the gaze. Outside the boundaries of documentary practice, his research unfolds as an autonomous visual language, in which places and people become part of a suspended and ambiguous space — at once physical and mental, interior and geographic.