The 2025 edition of Arte a San Leonardo presents “Memories of Reliable Things” by Linda Fregni Nagler. Invited to develop a new project, unveiled in March 2025 alongside the launch of the 2020 vintage of San Leonardo, the artist has created five original works that will become part of the San Leonardo Collection, as well as a special artist’s label designed for 999 bottles of the 2020 vintage.
For this third edition, Linda Fregni Nagler focused her research on the San Leonardo museum, established in 1975 by Marchese Carlo Guerrieri Gonzaga. The museum houses dozens of objects linked to the estate’s history and the region’s agricultural heritage. The artist selected five objects from the collection, transforming them into timeless, suspended images, highlighting their uniqueness and aesthetic and technical qualities.
Artistic label by Linda Fregni Nagler for San Leonardo 2020
For the project “Memories of Reliable Things”, the artist photographed various objects and tools—once everyday and familiar, now obsolete and often enigmatic to those unfamiliar with their use—preserved in the San Leonardo Museum.
Through a manual process of transferring images from photography to drawing and back to photographic printing, Fregni Nagler has given these objects new life and fresh interpretations, emphasizing their beauty, intricate details, and harmonious forms that endure even when their practical function has faded.
The five works, the result of the artist's research for Arte a San Leonardo, exist in a space between drawing and photography. Their ambiguity reflects the complexity of their nature: captured with an aesthetic reminiscent of old photographic negatives, they depict objects shaped by knowledge and craftsmanship passed down through generations.
These include machinery, furniture elements, and tools that anyone familiar with agriculture and viticulture’s past may recognize, yet to a contemporary or untrained eye, they appear mysterious. Every detail, highlighted by the contrast of black and white, tells the story of the expertise of their makers and the gestures of those who once used them.
Through the artist’s vision, these "reliable things," removed from their original context, transform into timeless, magnetic, and almost mystical images, open to countless interpretations..
The artist
Linda Fregni Nagler is an artist who works mainly with the medium of photography. She was born in Stockholm and lives in Milan, where she graduated from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in 2000. Her work is an exploration of the origins of the modern gaze and focuses on photography and its history, through a practice that weaves together the characteristics of the artist’s work, those of the scholar and the collector. Her studio is, before being a place of production, a place of reception where, after a process of meticulous selection and collection, the photographs come together to be reworked and reactivated, thus taking on new meanings. Her field of interest ranges from theory to the materiality of the photographic image, from the history of photography to the study of iconographic conventions and visual clichés, from the anonymous and vernacular image to appropriation as a contemporary artistic practice.
