CARDIFF, UK.-Ffotogallery presents Raffaela Mariniello, on view through November 6, 2005. The industrial and post-industrial urban landscape occupies a central role in the work of Italian artist, Raffaela Mariniello. Her meticulously crafted photographs depict urban spaces and sites of industrial activity and, in particular, the seaports of various international cities. This exhibition, curated by Aldo Rinaldi, and a major component of Cardiff's centenary celebrations in 2005, is the artist's first solo show in the UK, and includes newly commissioned works made in and around Cardiff, alongside recent work produced in Europe and North Africa.

Executed almost exclusively at night – using extended exposures – Mariniello's photographs are transformative: banal inner city housing blocks, factories and industrial architecture are elevated into images of extraordinary beauty and pathos. While this work is conscious of the authorship of Bernd and Hilla Becher and their objective recording of industrial architecture, Mariniello avoids a purely formalist form of observation and serial documentation in favour of a practice that is more classical and impressionistic in its approach. References to ancient architecture abound, surfacing in the crumbling cement frame of derelict buildings and ancient city walls, evoking the heroics of past civilisations which the artist infuses with a latent political subtext. Her photographs are testament to the various economic forces that converge to form spaces of social alienation and unease, signified by street signs, blank advertising hoardings, puddles of reflective water and the repetitive geometric style of social housing. Above all, Mariniello plays with our sense of perception, producing sublime works with a monochrome aesthetic that heightens our sense of distance and detachment from the relentless urban sprawl.

The artist was born in Naples in 1961, where she lives and works. Her first introduction to photography was working for a press photography agency in her early twenties. Her works are to be found in several international public and private collections and she is represented by Galleria Rubin, Milan and Studio Trisorio, Naples.

The exhibition is accompanied by a limited-edition hard-back monograph published by Ffotogallery in association with Cardiff 2005 and including an essay by the leading writer and critic Jon Bird.