Billboards

Choosing a precise category of subjects in the context of a marginal landscape, and employing terse, essential and synthetic language, in the photographic series Billboards Maurizio Montagna has worked on an absence: the space left blank on advertising billboards. Roberta Valtorta writes: "Maurizio Montagna's photography is direct.
It is the photography of 'real' things, or what is in front of the eyes and the camera, which has nothing to do with the dimension of digital intervention.
And yet, in our contemporary age, when photography is being transformed into images, we cannot help but think that it might be a digital process of electronic cancellation. In a certain sense these empty panels recall the canvases whic Lucio Fontana chose to slash once, twice, many times, Yves Klein's monochromes, Mark Rothko's painted backgrounds, the work of Mondrian himself. There is, therefore, an abstract component in this photography which has a frankly documentary feel.
Their realist soul is conversely felt in a simple and clear way, and speaks to us plainly of these mute structures and of the landscape. The empty billboards are guides to the landscape, pretexts for looking at the landscape. Therefore, from one photograph to the next, we see blocks of flats, cars, motorbikes, street furniture, streets, walls, green spaces, snow, scattered houses, bushes, homes and factories, and all the elements which go to make up the urban fabric".