The horizon is an elusive thing.

Like a summons, it may be made of many different things.
We speak of a horizon of houses, or a horizon of sea, of grass or of sand.

It is the things that compose it that make and unmake it each time, as though in itself it did not exist at all, as though it possessed no substance of its own. Continuous and incorporeal, it is always shifting and always distant, and one begins to suspect that it can only be grasped when things gather together, resting upon a line.

Horizon is the name we give to the territory where sight comes to an end, and in this sense the horizon is somewhat like light, whose purity is essentially inaccessible to us: to see it, it must strike a surface or pass through a substance, even if it is only the air.

Like light, the horizon materialises only in the incidences that gather around it from afar. Thus, those who possess the language of philosophy may say that the horizon is a deposit of individual experience, because each time it is created and recreated from a particular station, from a certain point of observation.

The horizon moves with us, and with us we can carry it, like a piece of hand luggage filled with infinity.

Whether it is a horizon of concrete or of vapour, of electric wires or of events, the horizon rests where things appear to end. Those things which, unlike us, never truly end.

And if it is true that it is among the places most frequented by poets, the horizon is also loved by those who do not know how to name it; it enchants even those who do not know the meaning of the word contemplation.

Its essence survives the forms in which artists embody it, so that it always remains new, even when it seems known and recognised.

Like things beyond price, it is made of little and nothing — above all of nothing — and no one possesses it.

In its constant distance, it turns the very notion of absence back upon those who look at it, and the absent ones are always ourselves.

Like the places familiar to us, or those we shall never visit, its chromatic range is manifold: there are horizons of fog, vast and indistinct like the variety of greys, and blazing horizons that dazzle like plaster in summer.

A life may be made of a succession of horizons, one after another. There are also those who, over the years, have fixed their memory upon paper, spending their days reimagining that memory upon the canvas. Then they place them in a row, one beside the other, all these different forms of distance, arranging them within a single room like an attic of far-off points made, for a moment, a little closer.

For a few weeks, this temporary room takes shape on the ground floor of Assab One, in 2026, and carries with it the reminiscence of another horizon that in 2014 Luca Pancrazzi traced upon an interior wall of the same building. Mi disperdo e proseguo lasciandomi indietro un passo dopo l’altro was the title of that wall drawing, and today this declaration of gradual departure occupies the entrance façade of the complex.

It is distance, in all its forms, that the art of Luca Pancrazzi seems to concern itself with, whether it rests upon a horizon as thin as a frequency or ventures into the disturbance of transmission within an enlarged and grainy photograph. It always seems to be looking elsewhere, and yet it lingers among the interferences it encounters along the way — and that, along the way, it comes to love.

Alessandro Rabottini