His search is of an anthropological kind: reasoning nearly assumes a scientific rigour, but for an artistic result. According to his rationally chosen method, Valdarnini contemplates the sudden shot, the instant-stealing one; a manner he's obviously forced to respect, but that could also be a hindrance from thinking. He is interested in catching immediate reality - which can also be influenced by chance - but chiefly in studying its innermost meaning, being led by his instinct, and always complying with a tecnique he has been sensibly mastering with the passing of the years. His "portrait" doesn't exclude experimentation. The character seized by his photographic eye is understood, hardly deprived of what is superfluous, is laid bare and absorbed. Thus his portaits of Balthus or Oren, of Lavia or Scalfari render their character to us, but not in the azard of an unexpected encounter; they reflect the autor's idea, based on his comprehension of the subject. 

    Moreover, we have his experimentation of "picture-motion", theorized by  Gilles Deleuze and inspiring Valdarnini's portraits of  Fabio Mauri, Pietro Consagra, Luigi Ontani. Here his research becomes almost of a cinematographic  kind, but it doesn't consist of the photodynamics ranging from Marey to  Bragaglia. It's actually the "slightest shift" of the picture, which is not then realized in a  single shot recording and assembling a sequence of instants, but is serial, in progress, film-like, and unwilling to be a film. A photographic research somehow reminding that of a  Kiarostami "photographer", which one day, why not, could become "cinema" itself. 

   Together with  portraying the human being, Valdarnini made also original representation of objects which are more "still lives", and which indeed he considers as human-like phenomena. His approach is the same. It's light to distinguish and bring the object out, to make it a monument out of a minimal occasion, neither more nor less than a painter who studies and re-creates a  still-life. Here Valdarnini's view is both classical and modern. His research on ligth ceaseless and comes from far away; but sometimes his attention to ligth, which is fundamental for him, materializes into a momentary encounter. It's possible then to talk about sudden intuition in his case too. He never lacks fortune which gives birth to  "the rigth moment" almost magically. Fortune and chance share a lot  of variables. 

    Ligth condition objects, enhances them, or else distort and mortifies them by virtue of its atmospheric wave but also of the hindrances due to distance. It renders the object's inner life and reveals its core. And as Valdarnini's touch in his portaits always  avails itself of light, like a personal paint-brush, it happens likewise when he deals with ordinary objects become characters. Thus his round loaf on travertine, though remaining itself, becomes the portrait of an ancestral totem; his cloth is a sixteen-century figure's turban, as  if it had painted by a master of the epoch. His egg looks like a ghosly face. His "big-pumpkin" is a mysterious heraldic seal. And his cauliflower head on a wooden box base is still a  "head", perhaps of a mysterious, fantarchaeological, alien creature. Lighting must be balanced, because if it's excessive it become also a violence; but-Goethe wondered-because it can be against nature? Can't it surpass nature, after all?

                    Mario Verdone