So many things in the air! is the second solo exhibition by Antonio Rovaldi at Galleria Michela Rizzo.

The exhibition is conceived as a journey in stages that follows the gestation of Rovaldi's latest book dedicated to the margins of NYC, along the lines of a face of a lesser-known, more wild and hidden city, as the title of the book itself suggests: The Sound of the Woodpecker Bill: New York City.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from the first verse of the poem Three Airs by the American poet and art critic Frank O 'Hara, from the Lunch Poems collection (1953-1964) dedicated to the city of New York, to walking as an associative practice, to its rhythms and to the colors of the city. This first verse translates into a blue neon on a gallery wall, a lightning-fast conversation - like a sudden vision during a walk - with the author of the poem: "Yes Frank, so many things in the air!". The neon lights up the room where, from two stereo speakers, a voice repeats the stops of a long walk around the edges of New York, declaiming the names of places, streets, hours of the day, alternating and superimposing on sound fields recorded between 2016 and 2018 by Rovaldi himself. Five Walk. NYC is also the result of the collaboration between Antonio Rovaldi and the Sound Designer Tommaso Zerbini. The installation consists of five chapters - as many as there are boroughs in the city - and is a constant flow of voices and sound geographies.

Like an alter ego of the artist, a voice accompanies the listening along a circular sound line, passing from noisy urban environments to more interstitial, peripheral corners, where silence finds space to articulate the story of a journey that develops through pauses and second thoughts.

The first room of the gallery collects photographic cycles made between 2018 and 2019.
Small-format photographs, like a constellation of points in space, tell of a geography that is recomposed through the time of a journey on foot and that subsequently reconstructed within the pages of a book. Some sculptural interventions scattered throughout the three rooms of the gallery interact with the photographs in the sound and liquid space of a city half submerged by water: a journey into images and into the process of photography itself.
The top floor is occupied by the video installation The Rest of The Images. The video, the result of the collaboration between Rovaldi and the director Federica Ravera, is both a documentation of the artist's artistic practice within his workplace and a close relationship between walking, photography (its processes and supports) and assembling the images in a sequence. Last but not least, the relationship between the one who films and the one who is filmed. The photographs that the artist's hands move on the floor of his studio redesign geographies and the trajectories of balls that splash into space, fast and random, suggest new possible directions, while the face of a city moves away and its sound is lowered.

Once again Rovaldi returns to reflect on the relationship between image and physical movement of the walking body, on the memory of a geographical experience that took place some time ago and the need to rethink distances, in the belief that places are complex and non-containable elastic systems. in one image.