Maurizio Montagna, Toros: the marking of a territory, 2022

The unmistakable silhouette of the Osborne bull is so deeply rooted in our minds, it has become a vernacular object in photography: widely used in art and cinema, due to its widespread recognizability and the powerful image it evokes, they could be considered one of the most potent images of the recent decade. In Montagna’s photographies, the big Osborne signs an articulate and controversial dialogue with the surrounding areas. They become a means to describe the landscape, opening a diatribe with the social and natural environment and revealing the role of images as interference between public/and private, power/perception, politics and people. Montagna’s images unveil the mechanisms of forming a disputable meaning in the landscape.