The first night of the image #2
2014/2015
Birth / a look/ as if nothing happened / Adam and adamitic / the primitive and savage state of being / conjuring images that existed before the birth of the image / resistance / melancholy / the eternal return of daily life / I hope something happens to break the ice / touching upon ones own rituals / I see it and I finished it /off-cell / desire to expand / I cry tears like sculpture / it’s all true because I see it / choose and concentrate / the latest sighting / eyes are the body / Cloke my face / inertia and a hot statue / a touching eye / atrophy the mother tongue / the latent history of my being / the wild forests of Africa.
These words are thoughts and input gathered over the years. They create a map that attempts to explain the development and the construction of the images.
Wall / a natural figure / a hand / geometric elements - are the four components that together create these photographed art installations.
The wall, divided into sections with one part darker and one part lighter, is not only the background but also the idea of possible horizons despite being static and without depth. The wall carries out its function of being unsurmountable while at the same time being in sync with other objects present. The wall creates a specific area and it begs the question what is this spatiality and what is its identity in relation to the photographs. Firstly, I don’t think it’s a question of being a physical space on the mere courtyard filled and dominated by some objects. As represented by the wall, this space preserves its relationship with the present objects not by dominating but by embracing them and so the objects become part of the spatial nature of the installation.
Every installation has a spatiality that can’t be separated from the original space where the installation was conceived. In Supporto the installation could not exist if not in this particular place–anywhere else and it would be another work of art altogether. This space is like its maternal lap; there can only be one. Only through the medium of photography with the fixed moment of every shot it is possible to perceive the spatial fabric between the object and its surroundings.
If I were to find one word to describe the sensation, the word would be “suspense” ; it’s hard to see where the object ends and the space begins as in some of the photographs of Medardo Rosso although they are completely different visually.
The natural figure is always present and has a form that repeats itself; for example in Antonioni Visioniand in Disvelamento in which the image of a forest is subject to an unveiling within the image (in the first case) and is subdivided into a triptych (in the second case). The photograph of the forest was shot in Congo in 2013 and is obviously a memory of a tender moment that in time became a trope for the image of absolute nature - the “pars pro toto”. This force symbolizes nature – all of nature. In Antonioni Visioni it is a symbol. Inspired from the scene of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Eclisse, the photograph contains a third element: the hand. A hand is pointing and wants to accompany your gaze towards a certain point as if wanting to ask a question: what’s over there? Is that the right place? Am I touching and seeing the same thing?
Hands and gazes are meant as metonymy for their qualitative proximity. Looking becomes touching and vice versa. Jacques Derrida touches upon this in his philosophic text, On Touching, Jean Luc Nancy, which I have been carrying around for years. This book is very special because it’s a sort of compilations of reflections from correspondence between two thinkers. A central theme is the question of touch: he supposes that maybe the sense of touch contains all the other senses within it and how that refers to the body which over the course of history has meant many different things - from the erotic to religious, from the knowing to the ethical.
“When i catch your eye I can see that it’s your gaze coming from your eyes, with a loving fascination, and your eyes are not only seeing but also being seen (things that are objects in the world), and I could touch them, in fact, with my hands, with my lips, and also with the eyelids and lashes of my eyes - by coming close to you, if I would one dare dare come so close”. 1
In Antonioni Visioni the hand becomes an extension of a look towards an imaginary point in front of the triptych.
The triptych as it is used in the installation Disvelamento is made up of three images that should be read as you would a text, from left to right (or however you read…), and shows the discovery of nature: a figure with lots of little spheres similar to a molecular structure which gets peeled back to another image that lies below.
Diptychs and triptychs (and sometimes politiptych) are often used; perhaps it’s a legacy from philosophers who, using this format, have been able to show an argument, for esample, a syllogism in the case of the triptych. Its significance is completely momentary: every image included is like one frame taken from cinema film.
The Dittico del ventre tenero offers two images, one behind the other, and represents movement: the hand is pulling a thread that raises a large pendulum behind which a stylized flower is hidden. Again in the same layering and spontaneity of appearance – hypothetical and continuous going from one state to another.
The geometric elements are a constant, particularly the circle which brings us back to the circle of life and the movement of the universe. The supporting base for these forms in Supporto are rounded and its whiteness takes us back to an apollonian form.
This carefully researched purity contrasts the reality of the Forest background – like Dionysus – where reason falls into chaos. Simbolo in gabbia also has circular forms, one of which is spiral and has several meanings and which is firmly surrounded by precise geometry that encompasses it and creates a juxtaposition of form.
I think that the artificial objects placed in these images rely on a constant sense of duplicity in which opposites meet but don’t resolve and each object is unique but without closure, kind of like what happens when you mix oil and water when two liquids just don’t amalgamate – limited by an eternal oxymoron.
This is an essential aspect in Dittico delle branchie e delle lune. Folded and unfolded bits of paper hang – lighted –; their presence is frail in keeping with the rhythm of the other photographs: the idea is to create a rhythm that sounds like the opening and closing of fish gills as well as the moon’s movement. The background is not an actual wall but rather evergreen trees that create a wall nonetheless. You’re not supposed to see the sky beyond.
1 Jacques Derrida, Jean Luc Nancy, On Touching, Marietti, 1820, Genova-Milano 2007 p. 13.
