Federico Forlani is one of a new breed of young Italian artists working in photography who, through an inventive configuration of the diaristic and the theatrical, explores the limitations of the self. With great sensitivity towards his subjects, which often include the artist himself, Forlani evokes a poetic universe that runs counter to the immersive reality of our everyday lives. It is a pensive universe where love and beauty rule over all practical considerations, a place of suspended gestures that, in their quietude, somehow manage to declaim their truths louder than any words. It is a universe I wish I could inhabit.