The Light That Comes Within

In the 8th edition of our "Art Happenings," we invite you to discover the work of Giovanni Ozzola, presented at the 10th edition of the Lerici Music Festival:

I miei orizzonti e Tu — My Horizons and You

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What to Know:

Artist. Giovanni Ozzola — Florence-born (1982), contemporary visual artist. His work spans installation, sculpture, engraving, photography, and video, with a particular and abiding focus on the relationship between light, space, and time.

Curator. Carlo Orsini — the Lerici Music Festival's Head of Intermediality, a multimedia curator who, in collaboration with Galleria Continua, has cultivated what he terms a "fertile intermediality," staging sound, image, and space as a single, layered conversation.

Patron. Margherita Amirkhanian is the quieter architect behind the Lerici Music Festival's creative ambition, and the presiding presence at Villa Marigola whose personal hospitality has, through the Lerici Cultura Foundation she now stewards, given the festival's contemporary-art program its artistic spirit and coherent presence.

Gallery. Galleria Continua is known for pioneering a boundary-defying, multi-continent gallery model — establishing major contemporary art spaces in unexpected places. It rests on the founding conviction that contemporary art finds continuity within landscapes steeped in older history.

Festival. The Lerici Music Festival occupies a distinctive position among European classical music festivals: conceived in 2017 by conductor Gianluca Marcianò as a personal act of homage to his native Gulf of Poets. It has earned its membership in the European Festivals Association for its increasingly deliberate practice of setting music in a dialogue with contemporary visual art.

ABOUT

There are such places — where, before you even enter, there is already a bittersweet anticipation of a story.

Villa Marigola is one of them. Built in the late eighteenth century by the Marchese Gaetano Ollandini on the ruins of an old coastal fortification, then reshaped across the following century by an English romantic-garden sensibility, the villa folds these successive cultures into a single scene — one of thoughts left, for a while, uninvited, and of reflections that feel somehow eternal.

As you walk in and climb the stairs toward the contemporary happening, you are met at once by the duality the exhibition holds. A stripe of heavenly blue sky, joined by the horizon of turquoise water, seen from within a dark, half-ruined World War II bunker. Somehow, in the same instant, disparate emotions take hold of you: attraction and repulsion, serenity and violence, lightness and darkness.

Stuck in the middle with you, 2026 / stampa giclée su carta di cotone, Dibond / cornice 150 x 220 x 3 cm/Ed. 1 + 1 AP

Confused, yet compelled to understand what is being said, you continue deeper into the exhibition.

Among orange walls and elegant marble floors, another contradiction unfolds: a set of works catching the sunset, framed through the aperture of an old ruin — a sight that makes you consider how fragile the momentum of life, of existence itself, truly is.

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Untitled - a fine primavera, 2026/stampa giclée su carta di cotone, Dibond, cornice/133 x 91 x 3 cm/Ed. 1 + 1 AP

Untitled - with a view, 2026/stampa giclée su carta di cotone, Dibond, cornice/125 x 91 x 3 cm/Ed. 1 + 1 AP

The dialogue between the two is fascinating — the freshness and order of nature set against the fading beauty of past centuries. Is that not all of us? Formed by our past, illuminated by a present built on contradiction, on the duality of being.

Moving further, you encounter familiar reflections altered once again — seen now in retrospect, in miniature; seen in two dimensions, and then expanded toward a three-dimensional reality. By this point you are already tempted, already seduced into seeking the answer: which side prevails in you?

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A mani vuote di te, 2026/stampa giclée su carta di cotone, Dibond, cornice/220 x 150 x 3 cm/Ed. 1 + 1 AP

Ozzola's horizons, for this edition, are drawn from his own long meditation on the coastline he knows best — the sunrises and sunsets he has spent years photographing from within the abandoned war bunkers of Europe's shores, structures built for vigilance now surrendered to weather and time. Here at Lerici, that meditation finds its counterpart: a villa that has survived by being cared for, set against ruins that have survived by being forgotten — two ways the past insists on being seen. What Ozzola offers is not an image of hope, nor one of decay, but the narrow, exact seam where the two must be looked at together. His horizons do not resolve; they wait, quite deliberately, for the Tu — for you — to complete them.

Cohen once wrote that there is a crack in everything, and that this is how the light gets in. So, presumably, the question left for each of us to answer is this — what is your's? (crack, of course)