Silent Landscapes

On 13 February 2027 Giuliano Giuliani returns to Dubai with a solo exhibition titled Silent Landscapes, at The Warehouse in Goshi Village, in the heart of Al Quoz 3. It follows the success of his solo show at the Dubai Design District a few years ago.

For anyone who has followed his work for some time, the title will sound familiar. Years ago I wrote about his “silent landscapes” in the pages of a well-known Italian art magazine, and finding them again today, a few thousand kilometres from Italy, feels rather special.

The silence of those canvases has remained the same, but the city hosting them has changed considerably. Dubai is extremely dynamic and always on the move. It is a city in perpetual transformation, a place with a pulse of its own, where little room is left for waiting or for silence. That is precisely why Giuliani’s painting will find a particularly attentive audience here, drawn to the quietness of his work. Walking into a room where the paintings never raise their voice but speak softly instead means slowing down, finally giving the eye time to settle into their poetic calm.

Giuliani’s silent landscapes do not describe a specific place. There are no recognisable hills or picture-postcard coastlines; often even the horizon is missing, lost in a haze where sky and land run together. What remains is the painting itself: glazes laid over other glazes, countless layers settling one upon another until they create a depth that belongs to time before it belongs to perspective. The artist leaves the traces of his work visible, including scratches and revisions, so that the finished painting retains something of the process that produced it.

Even back then I was struck by the way he builds the image layer upon layer. There is no attempt to simulate three-dimensional depth. The planes stay flat, and it is from their succession that a different kind of space emerges, unlike that of traditional perspective. Each layer carries the previous one with it, even when it almost hides it. Look long enough and something begins to resurface. The painting preserves both its hesitations and its certainties, as though each canvas retained the memory of the time spent creating it.

There is a sentence of his that I still consider the key to this cycle: “My landscapes grow out of a reflection on human solitude, suspended between all that belongs to us and all that we, inevitably, belong to. I believe the strength of my work lies above all in what is deliberately left outside its visual boundaries, in what is not shown and yet somehow remains. To make a presence perceptible through an absence: perhaps that is where these landscapes find their meaning.”

Those words have stayed with me. Years later, they still seem to capture something essential in Giuliani’s painting: what is absent never entirely disappears, and what we see seems constantly to suggest something beyond the visible.

The quick glance that screens have accustomed us to is of little use here. Tonal gradations and transparencies emerge slowly, and some differences reveal themselves only after the work has been given the attention it deserves. We have grown used to consuming images in a matter of seconds, only to replace them immediately with others. With these paintings, the opposite is true: we need to stop and give them time. And perhaps the finished painting is not even the real centre of Giuliani’s work. It is what remains of a process of additions, erasures and returns. The surface holds this history without spelling it out. There is no need to reconstruct the order of the brushstrokes. It is enough to know that beneath what we see, something is still alive.

Then there are the titles, often painted directly onto the canvas. Giuliani wants them subtle yet legible, free of ambiguity, and never allowed to turn into separate captions. They stay inside the painting; they are the painting. Years ago I described them as a continuation of the visual message on another level of perception. I still see them that way: the words add something, but they do not explain the picture; they belong to it.

And there is solitude, which in his work often takes the form of a single tree in the fog. What interests Giuliani above all is the loneliness of someone who feels alone among other people. “I paint my solitude”, he has written, “I paint the despair of all those who feel alone in the crowd. I paint absence among invisible presences. I paint presence by means of absence.”

It is an important distinction. Giuliani is not simply talking about creative isolation, the kind every painter needs. He is talking about a solitude that can grow deeper precisely when others are around. The tree lost in the haze then becomes more than a recurring feature of the landscape, and it is not hard to see why it keeps returning in his work.

Seeing these works in Dubai inevitably adds something to the way we read them. Not because Giuliani painted them with this city in mind, but because few cities make the paradox of being among so many others quite so apparent. Here people meet all the time, languages and backgrounds cross, and daily life is spent among people who have come from every corner of the world. And yet, surrounded by so many, one can remain deeply alone.

Perhaps this is also why his silent landscapes arrive in Dubai without looking out of place. They have no need to adapt to the city. All they ask is that, for a few minutes, the people looking at them adapt to their time.

The exhibition opens on 13 February 2027 at The Warehouse, Goshi Village, Al Quoz 3, Dubai. Best seen without hurry.