In the photographs of Shanti Simonetti, reality is always recognisable, but something feels off. A figure sitting on asphalt wrapped in layers of torn fabric. A person in a white dress and clown makeup standing still in an anonymous room. A woman in front of a baroque wallpaper, her gaze elsewhere. Images that do not provide answers, but open questions — and leave them open.

The project is called Il Realismo Magico and the title works as a precise interpretive key: not the supernatural, not the uncanny in the classical sense, but something more subtle. Unusual details that alter the perception of otherwise ordinary scenes, creating a narrative space suspended between what is seen and what is sensed. Silence, says Simonetti, is the true protagonist. And in the photographs, you can feel it.

The choice of black and white for some images and desaturated colour for others is not accidental: it builds an atmospheric coherence that holds very different scenes together, always maintaining that quality of frozen time, of a moment that never resolves. There is no linear narrative, no before and after. Only the persistent feeling of having arrived at the wrong moment.