Techincal Info
MARIO LASALANDRA
“1962 –2006””
Curator: Fabrizio Boggiano
Opening: Thursday 23rd April 2009 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Period: 24th April to 31st May 2009
Location: VISION QUEST Contemporary Photography - Piazza Invrea 4 r, 16123 Genova, Italy
Tel.: +39 339 7534993 +39 010 265629
Opening times: Wednesday to Saturday 3.30 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. or by appointment +39 339 7534993
Website: www.visionquest.it
Email information: info@visionquest.it
The artist shall be present at the opening
Thursday 23rd April 2009 at 7 p.m. Professor Paolo Morello will present:
“Mario Lasalandra: Poets, Masks, Actors, Ghosts. Photographs 1962 – 2004”
ed. Issf.
Press Release
VISION QUEST Contemporary Photography is pleased to present the photographic exhibition by Mario Lasalandra “1962 – 2006”
Photography by Mario Lasalandra is separated from usually shared standards: his perception is totally different, rare and sophisticated, entirely devoted to the construction of an image that carries a unique evocative power in the international outlook of photography. The artist, in fact, conceives his work as recovering an inside uneasiness and carrying it in that magical place, where dreams belong to our deep inner selves. In this way he takes emotions inside fantastic places where everything appears to be suspended, ready to happen, where it is possible to perceive sensations until then unknown, but able to unlock the passage to a metaphysical universe, the limit of the surreal, which houses in the unconscious.
This is also why, although his work unfolds in a span of almost fifty years, Mario Lasalandra can be defined, indisputably, not only as one of the most important photographers in the world, but also one of the few immediately recognisable for the uniqueness and strength of his poetic message.
Paolo Morello writes:
Born in 1933 in Este, on the southern limit of the Euganei hills, Mario Lasalandra inherits in the fifties the workshop of his maternal grandfather, Federico Tuzza, painter and photographer. Soon he begins to alternate this activity with an original research: photographing in desolate locations clown like characters on which the influence of the early films of Fellini (La Strada, Le Notti di Cabiria) is very evident. Shortly the scenes become more complex, and Lasalandra begins to build fantastic stories which, although devoid of dramatic coherence, are full of evocations and references to figures of the modern mythography Thus his most famous series, Judgement, 1967. Scarecrows, 1968. Filodrammatici, 1968. Story of a Drama, 1970, all populated by a charming host of angels, virgins, prophets, masks, actors, ghosts.
Staggering figures, showing, through their precarious balance, the instability of an era when photography in Italy was crossed by a deep and irreparable crisis. But these figures, at the same time, have a strong relationship with history - from daguerreotypes to August Sander, from David Bailey to Diane Arbus - in a extraordinarily original way. Offering a constant, and still endless, variety of types and situations. Figures, which make Mario Lasalandra one of the most innovative and brilliant authors of contemporary photography