La Fotografia, un doppiofondo del vissuto

Curated by Paolo Dell’Elce

Artists: Giada Ciarcelluti, Lorenza D’Orazio, Marine Hovakimyan, Aram Kirakosyan, Mariam Mkheyan, Alessandro Nanni, Iacopo Pasqui, Romina Patiño, Maria Pavlovskaya, Evgenia Tolstykh.

The human story has always dealt with archetypes, now worn-out, whose purpose is to reassure, but we know that art never offers reassuring forms. Artistic languages are open to unknown possibilities that can surprise us, yet the tendency is to tame these languages, locking them into meanings that are known and conventionally recognized, expressed and codified once and for all, without any intention to break the vicious cycle of representation. Man, a prisoner of his own self-referentiality, continues to “tell” himself instead of opening up to contemplation and listening to the form, to the entities that present and manifest themselves. The monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey suddenly interrupts the attention of the living, and from that moment on, something happens. Through the work of young authors who experience the suggestion and feel the weight and responsibility of a gaze coming from afar, an ancestral legacy that has challenged time and survived trends, we can glimpse and recognize a distant common imprint, a disturbing feature of the human species that should make us reflect on the dynamics of our “evolution.”

The exhibition presents photographic works of great intensity and visual concentration, offering a particularly significant and heartfelt dimension of the human experience in its most delicate but also raw aspects. It attempts to go beyond the obviousness of the image, establishing deeper connections, analogies, and differences, within an exhibition path that involves both the aesthetic object and space. Here, the human being (and the world encompassing them) in their figurative expression becomes the discriminating entity between the categories of “true” and “false,” “presence” and “absence,” “visible” and “invisible.” Amid the contradictions inherent in their existence, it suggests the idea of another place, hidden beneath the seemingly familiar surface of daily life: a “subtext of experience” – the expression is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s – that emerges and takes shape in photography as a language and a visible index of the invisible, a witness to the time of light that gives depth and complexity to the life of every person.

How can we restore meaning and trust to human activities that have lost touch with the concreteness of the world around us? A world we perceive as “virtual,” dematerialized, struggling more and more to become real again and to return to being practical and livable. Listening to the younger generation, their requests reveal a hunger for truth that is moving. This need gives us hope. When you are young, you don’t settle for pre-packaged solutions, and you want to experience everything in the fullness of your own subjectivity. Each of the artists in this exhibition has chosen photography to amplify their perception and understanding, satisfying this hunger for truth and presence by tapping into a language of latency that essentially, even after the revolution of digital technology, remains photography (the photographic negative, but also the digital sensor, retains a latent image after the shutter of the camera is clicked, which will then have to be revealed chemically or by means of software for a digital image).

Thinking about each of these artists, young and not so young, about their dreams, their artistic and professional expectations, and how they found themselves in these images, I realized how similar these ‘young people’ are, after all. I understand that what unites them is the search for a truth and a beauty that corresponds to their most intimate form, to the beautiful people they embody. Some of them are already well advanced, and their path is well defined, while others have just started their journey and are still exploring the terrain. But all have a deep respect for the language with which they are engaging, and they are fully aware of the importance it holds for gaining knowledge and returning the truth that, today, especially the younger generation, deeply needs. From my side, I can confirm that what I have read and observed in their photographs exactly corresponds to what I see in their eyes: a spark of genuineness that I call the true human, a pure existential quality, a foundation of authenticity that emerges and is fulfilled in the living’s adherence to their experience, and which cannot be abandoned once glimpsed on people’s faces and touched.

(From: La Fotografia, un doppiofondo del vissuto by Paolo Dell’Elce)