From June 12 to October 4, 2025, CUBO-the Unipol Group’s business museum-is hosting in its two locations in Bologna the solo exhibition of Nicola Nannini (Bologna, 1972) entitled Non è ancora buio, curated by writer Simona Vinci. The exhibition features sixteen medium- and large-scale paintings in a path that reflects on the nature of landscape not only as a representation of reality, but as a mental space, cultural construction and place of sedimentation of memory.
The installation is developed in two separate venues: CUBO in Torre Unipol, where the works dedicated to nocturnal landscapes are collected, and CUBO in Porta Europa, which hosts instead the works focused on daytime landscapes. The subdivision between light and darkness becomes a conceptual key to the entire project. While the twilight suggested by the title indicates a liminal moment when light endures but darkness looms, the juxtaposition of day and night refers to the complexity of perception and the subjective character of the gaze.
The night works exhibited in the Unipol Tower present environments suspended between visibility and shadow, in which human presence becomes rarefied, and the landscape becomes a space of waiting and introspection. In the canvases, light transforms, drawing outlines, isolating details and blurring contours. In Oggetto notte (Night Object), a 150x200 cm canvas that is part of Unipol Group’s artistic heritage, one perceives a dilated time, a silence inhabited only by the tension of observation. The atmosphere, charged with ambiguity, allows a narrative to emerge that insinuates itself among the architecture and artificial lights, returning an image of the landscape as a mental and perceptive place. Different is the approach in the Porta Europa location, where works dedicated to the daytime landscape find their place. Here the light is full, but never neutral. The places represented are traversed by human presences, visible or barely suggested, belonging to different geographical, cultural and temporal contexts. The landscape is a living, inhabited surface, a witness to individual and collective histories. Houses, buildings, streets, bear the signs of time and use on themselves. Architectures appear as organisms that absorb experience and return it in the form of traces, becoming mirrors of the identities of those who have inhabited or passed through them.
Nicola Nannini, an artist from Bologna who has always been attentive to the themes of memory and visual stratification, constructs a pictorial language in which observed reality is intertwined with imagination, and the landscape is charged with symbolic and narrative elements. Attention to light, architectural detail, and atmospheric rendering are combined with an emotional tension that is revealed in the composition and choice of subjects. His works evoke a condition, suggest a presence, open a space for reflection.
Alongside the paintings, the exhibition is accompanied by a catalog that features an unpublished text by Simona Vinci, a writer and winner of the Campiello Prize in 2016, who joined the artist in the construction of the project. Vinci’s literary contribution stands as a narrative counterpoint to the images. The words give voice to the places, bring out their stories, and transform the painted landscape into a narrative territory in which reality and fiction merge. The voices that surface, real or imaginary, are those of buildings, streets, passers-by: fragments that build an interweaving of territory, history and subjectivity. The dialogue between painting and writing results in a continuous flow, where images feed texts and vice versa. Landscape, understood as a cultural device, is thus revealed in its multiple dimension: not objective, not neutral, but traversed by perceptual stratifications, temporal overwriting and identity constructions. In this perspective, the exhibition invites visitors to overlay their own experience, to question the relationship between space and memory, image and lived experience.
The choice of the title It is not yet dark effectively summarizes the meaning of the project: that moment of transition where light endures and darkness looms, where vision becomes more uncertain and at the same time more intense. In this temporal threshold lies Nannini’s reflection on the landscape as a place of transition and transformation, where observation becomes an act of interpretation and awareness. Twilight, more than an atmospheric condition, becomes a metaphor for the relationship between the individual and his or her environment, between personal and collective memory. The exhibition, organized by CUBO as part of its cultural programming, is part of the Unipol Group’s path of enhancing its artistic heritage, of which some of the works on display are part. The layout, distributed between two venues, allows for an articulated reading of Nannini’s work, which moves between different but complementary atmospheres, offering the viewer the chance to explore the theme of landscape from different angles.
The official opening is scheduled for Thursday, June 12, at 6 p.m., while the press conference for the presentation will be held on Wednesday, June 11, at 11:30 a.m. The venues involved are CUBO in Torre Unipol, Via Larga 8, and CUBO in Porta Europa, Piazza Sergio Vieira de Mello 3/5, both in Bologna.
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| It's not dark yet: in Bologna, landscape as memory in the canvases of Nicola Nannini |
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