Riccardo Fregoso, Winter Light, 2025

“We wander through invisible worlds, waiting to fall into bodies. In that phase, consciousness immerses itself, remaining to gaze upon itself. The boundaries of each being breathe, thickening and thinning, breathed by consciousness. We find ourselves spontaneously; it seems as though we greet one another without needing to move our legs and arms. Instead of stretching out our fingers, it is the dust of consciousness that stretches out on its own, massaging us in its impalpable, jovial accordion.” – from the text by Francesco Pacifico.

Following the success of the urban anti-dream Adriatico—his debut book—Riccardo Fregoso returns with a new volume, where the images are no longer composed by the late-afternoon light of the Adriatic coast, but by the winter light, entirely Lombard, which Fregoso knows just as well. The rarefied atmospheres produced by this ephemeral, sharp light are equally metaphysical, but the subjects change. Intimacy no longer belongs to childhood memories and summer vacations: instead, it takes shape within the home and in familiar landscapes, where light filters through curtains and windows, settling on everyday objects and loved ones, constructing new emotional geographies.

The images comprising the volume were taken starting in 2018 and are the result of a seven-year journey. The outcome is a body of work that rejects the rhetoric of the “return home” to open itself, instead, to a broader reflection on photography’s capacity to transform the everyday into a field of inquiry. In this new series, Fregoso constructs a magical realism distinguished by compositional subtlety and luminous sensitivity: it is precisely the light, operating by subtraction, that excavates, isolates, and reveals gestures, faces, and places, restoring the interstitial spaces of an ordinary that becomes extraordinary.