I took the photographs presented in this solo exhibition while exploring the pavilions of the 50th Venice Biennal of Contemporary Art, without any pre-existing project or intention.
The crossing of the room, the continuity of the vision and the concentration necessary for a synthesis have been the hallmarks of my work; and the innate obligation to photography, to its just two dimension, have had the weight and the relief of a compulsion to order and of the search fora an immediately emotive efficacy in places where, conversely, videos refer to their playing out, installations to their traversability and television screen to their unstable surface a dilated sense where everythings tends toward narration, toward literature.
These visual arts are no longer visual, nothing exist any longer in and of itself; rather, for both the artist and for the spectator time and motion are as indispensable as listening and attention are for the composer.
It is an elegy of the present, of the momentary, of the here and now and of “representation” because to enjoy this art one has to enter take one’s place and, essentially, look on.
I have simply attempted to grasp the diverse intentions, conferring upon each image the indispensable tension required for it to stand independently of time, of place, and for the totality of the space to which it belongs, because photographs have just one single form, emit just one single note, live the time of a glance and are evanescent as a phantom, an apparition.
Black and white photographic paper is basically a paper coated with a silver emulsion. This can be oxidised to produce any shade from jet black to bright white, with an infinity of shades and color in between.
With a great deal of patience, a long sequence of developing an fixing baths and a series of partial toning bath, parts of the image can be damped down, parts highlighted and yet others toned in blue, green, red or sepia, or the combination of all these tones.
Result are controllable but not repeatable. The final print is to the original negative much as the artist’s canvas is to the palette, and nothing more.
The photographs in this series, also for the “Sacks” series, are unique original copies. The chemical process does not permit one to create identical copies. For this reason the series is created by drum scanning the originals and then printing them on chemical colour paper by plotter.