A personal exhibition of the works by Italian photographer Francesco Gnot is being hosted at the gallery SpazioFoto Credito Artigiano, in Florence. Possible Landscapes is being organised and mounted under the supervision of Nicoletta Leonardi. The exhibition includes about thirty medium and big sized colour photographs, which were taken over the period between 2000 and 2003.
Gnot took almost all of these photos with a small, compact fixed-focus camera while on long nocturnal wanderings. The pre-planned automatism of the camera granted him the best possibility to reveal the marginal, visual experience of the passer-by. The representation of this individual, and at the same time collective, experience brings to light tensions, pleasures, desires and fears. The title 'Possible Landscapes' evokes the state of spatial and temporal disorientation caused by the continual shifting between the familiar sense of belonging and the feeling of extraneousness in the experience of places. These stunning colour images bear witness to a desire to rediscover in public and private spaces the coordinates of places that are still inhabitable and recognisable; environments where the traces of other lives have left their mark.

The systematic use of a flash, with its sharp and harsh light, gives the images a surreal, or otherwise extraneous and hallucinatory feel. Through his strategy of disorientation Gnot "arrests" your glance, leading it away from the beaten track; focusing our attention on objects and everyday places that might otherwise be considered marginal. By doing this Gnot invites us to think about how the affective dimension can still give a meaning to experience, even in a world […] He helps us to see the frame within which we act from a new vantage point.

At first glance, one might say that Francesco Gnot's symbolic world is trying to "stage" a world without men, uninhabited and given over to the pure external existence of disparate objects once produced by craftsmen and factory workers.

According to Pietro Barcellona, "Francesco Gnot is a child, the child that all adults bear within themselves and whose existence they negate. He is looking for someone who can provide an answer to the question: What are these "objects"? They are us: ourselves projected out of our souls like bridges towards the world of others. As long as there are objects and traces of people, the spell of desertification can be broken and the magic word that breathes life back into "things" can reappear.
Whoever things that photography is little more than technique, still hasn't understood its intimate rapport with alchemy, which is the same for each artistic fact: giving a "shape" to what is not there.

Francesco Gnot was born in Florence, in 1965. He studied photography at the Fondazione Studio Marangoni, in Florence. From 1995 to 1999, he taught darkroom technique at the same school. His work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including: Le Maschere dell'Uomo, hosted at Florence Anthropology Museum, in 2000; Paesaggi Possibili (organised and mounted under the supervision of Nicoletta Leonardi), hosted at Tuscan Photographic Archive, in Prato, in 2001; Events (organised and mounted under the supervision of Maria Antonia Rinaldi and Matteo Chini), hosted at Studio Arts Center International, in Florence, in 2001; Gemine Muse (organised and mounted under the supervision of Daria Filardo), hosted at the cloisters of Santa Maria Novella, in Florence, in 2002; Insider (organised and mounted under the supervision of Sergio Risaliti), hosted at Stazione Leopolda, in Florence, in 2003. In July, 2002, he was awarded the prize for "best portfolio of the day" by the Galerie D'Essay on the occasion of the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d'Arles.