Text on catalogue
My cat could sense when I was conig home lon before I actually did and he used to take his position in front of the door about half an hour before my return; perhaps after two days, a week or a month.
When I was young the things I was best at were skin-diving. Billards and drawing. To skin-dive well you ave to forget about the water and breathing, in billiards your opponent, the cue and the felt, in drawing the pencil and paper, and in all three it is the absence of intention that perfects your gesture, making it harmonious and efficient.
I began to draw when I was five, At eighteen the distance between object and image consisted in the time it took to outline it, shade it, colour it. This is why I stopped: you cannot be both architect and labourer of you own fantasy, one of the two takes all the possible pleasure and either the making becomes a waste of time or imagining an infinite repetition gyrating in circles.
Photography has allowed me to invert this process, to wait for the existence of an image rather than plan it. To recognise it, sharpening my emotions like the sensitivity of my hands over the years. We train the hand to the stroke so the hand becomes the stroke; the body to the water so the body becomes the water; the eye to feeling so hat your eye recognises youe feeling for the world of things, or can perceive their feeling.
Today I know that it is not the image of reality that compels me to portray par of it, but in its image I can search for the source of my feeling. Like an easy-going bloodhound I observe reality, and with the technical expertise of a demolition professional I look for that single point where, hitting just once, dead on, I will bring the superfluous to collaplse leaving that essential emotion that struck me. This is why the entire Basilica della Salute is in its Angel sentinels, the Giudecca islands is a stroke of charcoal and Colleoni is a man on horseback riding out for better or for worse. I am not interested in the coitus infinitely interruptus of thematic expositions in twenty portaits, two hundred catastrophes, two thousand landscapes and two million afflictions!; everyting is found in one single thing and is therefore a portrait, a flower, an affliction to the very heart, once an for ever.
One day my cat and I were before the open defrosting fridge. Suddenly, in the total silence he began to stare at it getting nervous. Twenty second later, with a grat crash, the entire sheet of ice in the freezer collapsed.
I have always taken very few photographs. Rolls could be of only five shots as far as I am concerned and just one would last me a whole year. I do not photograph people because people do not interest me. It would be presumptuous on my part and on theirs, beacause after early adolescence nobody is a they were anymore, they are as they to appear, and I am not interested in appareances.
I believe that whoevere is whatever they do, and whatever they do for themselves. I do not need to help anyone cross the road and it is worth Nobody’s while to follow me as I haven’t a clue where I’m going, nor do I care to know. Anyhow I’m growing old: lately the world, even that wich I have made with my own hands, can no longer speak to me.
Enthralling beauty, love at first sight becomes more and more rare. Often I go round and round a place for hours, trying to understand what detail speaks to me and what it is saying ut I remain unconvinced, unsatisfied, I take no photograph. I go away with the feeling that I have left something important behind and that I am not yet ready or sensitive enough. From twently years of photography I could save thirty photographs, and I would not be sure of a single one. But I have agreed to prepare this collection of unique pieces out of respect for the staffof the gallery. And perhaps in the illusion of being able to say something definitive about these twently images.
Nowadays I wait in total silence before reality like my cat before the door, concentrating so as o hear an emotion or the first stepd of he who is returning on the stairs, ready to learn to understand wherehe is, always to look for him again or make him feel waited for and loved because my cat is dead, and it’s my turn.
But perhaps learning to draw means to imagine, learning to swim means never the surface again and learning to pothograph means to stop.
Michele Alassio
september 2000
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