Opening reception: Thursday, March 23rd from 6.30 pm
Duration: March 24th – April 22nd, 2017
Location VisionQuesT 4rosso
Piazza Invrea 4 r, 16123 Genova, Italy
+39 010 2476642 – +39 335 6195394
Hrs: from Tuesday to Saturday 3 pm – 7 pm and by appointment
Web site: www.visionquest.it
Infromation and e-mail: info@visionquest.it
The artist will be present
Wedding photos are always bright, taken in the light and with flash. The brighter the image, the brighter the future.
Just for a moment, the moment of the photograph, there is the evidence of what will happen, of present and future happiness, of a life that will be sweet and together.
“Marriage” is the unknown future. It is the celebration of uncertainty in the form of marriage, a special day where we hope to learn about our future.
Marilisa Cosello has created this project during an artist residency in Finland, surrounded by darkness twenty hours a day. These new memories represent the beauty of human illusion continually confronting itself with the mystery of the unknown and the invisible.
Xavier Canonne, Director of the Musée de la Photographie of Charleroi, writes:
“Wedding photography has its codes, its rites. The Town Hall, and/or the church, the bouquet, champagne, cake and buffet are among the landmarks that must be met along the path to happiness; a path adorned with sceneries promenades at sunset or melancholic ruins, or a twilight horizon. Each sequence is immortalized in a photograph so that those moments remain engraved in the memory as are the names on the exchanged wedding rings.
Just like silverware given at weddings ̶ silver the metal on which the first photographs were printed ̶ the best day of our life, that which we would like to be festive and bright, slowly slips into the shadows of the everyday meltdown. Photographs and memories fade while love pines away. It is a cruel alchemy that sees gold turn into lead, the wedding dress fade away just like the table lamp light. What is then struggling on the surface of the image is either a drowning or floating ghost. Which of the two after the divorce will take those photographs that have suddenly become foreign? The one that goes away, the one that remains, the one who is still in love? Divorce photography is yet to be invented.
Marilisa Cosello has decided for some years now to question the photographic archives: starting with her family where many mysteries and doubts surfaced, childhood brainwaves, summers on the beaches of the Adriatic, the costumes at high school parties or the birthdays in the garden. Matrimonio is the other people’s archives, collected during a trip abroad, reproduced and reworked to give them a new interpretation, thus denying photography any finality. Far from yielding to the temptation of hunting for vernacular images, very fashionable today in the world of photography, these photographs are the very stuff that make us reflect on women’s fate, the stereotypes to which everything forces or leads them to.
The document here vanishes in front of the demonstration: Marilisa photographs them again, she overexposes, interprets and incorporates them as in a show where, their coming to life again, would deliver their own sense, thus opposing the certainty of the image to the precariousness of its destiny. The existence of those once photographed, of whom we know anything except a vanishing appearance, will perhaps betray the image, leaving it with no regrets. Yet nothing clashes and there is no desperation in the path of Marilisa Cosello, no lesson to be imposed. There remains only the blatant realization of life’s transience.”
