MATTEO GIROLA
VIEWFINDERS
October 3–5, 2025, 3–8 pm
Part of Milano Centrale Festival
Curated by Glenda Cinquegrana and Luca Panaro
Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is pleased to present Viewfinders, a solo exhibition featuring Matteo Girola, included in the program of Milano Centrale Festival, the event curated by Luca Panaro across several exhibition venues in the area surrounding Milan’s Central Station.
Viewfinders originated as an artist’s book and later unfolded into a full-scale exhibition project. As Panaro notes, from the pages of photographic manuals to the pages of an artist’s book, and now, for the first time, on the gallery walls. Men and women, depicted with cameras pressed to their faces, appear like new mechanical Cyclopes—reclaiming the autonomy of a gesture long dormant. Released from the pages of 20th-century photography manuals, these images acquire new urgency through an unexpected reversal: the camera is held backwards, subverting the very act of looking that underpins photography. The gesture is at once playful and insurgent, challenging conventions of vision and representation.
Girola’s process—rooted in a careful gathering and selection of historical images—suggests both an inversion of perspective and the need to search for alternative viewpoints on reality, based on acts of seeking, collecting, and intercepting new visions. His work calls upon viewers to look at reality anew, generating a circular exchange between image and spectator. As Panaro concludes, we, standing before an image, are suddenly observed by these camera-beings. Like them, we too are compelled to peer into the viewfinder—summoned by the artist as seekers of new vistas. Viewfinders, indeed.