CARLA IACONO, NICOLA VINCI COSTRUIRE DES HISTORIES

Building stories through images, with characters and places beyond time and space, or searching in our memories to find figures and places dear to our imagination
The exhibition by Carla Iacono and Nicola Vinci is a visual tale of two artists and their own approach in celebrating the evocative power of the image through transposition, introspective and psychological skills, charm and wit.

Carla Iacono’s images come "Antiwonderland", a project for a photography book. The artist uses the characters and places from her memory and subconscious to map out stories that tell us of a powerful and varied female universe. The protagonists are all female ”figures” explicitly drawn from or suggested by the world of art and literature, as Ophelia, Monet's house, the children of Balthus, the Crow Woman, the suggestive nature of the Gothic Tales. The evocative power of the female figure is therefore celebrated through fairytale images in which the subconscious can reveal fears and desires but it can also indulge in a free and playful creativity. In these images often a character "trespasses" in the territory of the other, in a kind of contamination that follows the completely non linear thread of the unconscious, while the stories "suggested" are revealed to the spectator in a sequence of "associations" reminiscent of surrealist automatic writings. And thus in "Dorothy in Iceland" the character of the Wizard of Oz arrives in a land of ice, populated by "humanized” animals that seem to come from a fable of Aesop. She plays with Shakespeare suggesting “noir” endings, while the spirit of Lewis Carroll hovers above.

For Nicola Vinci Instead, the images belong to the cycle "Transfert". He shows us his subjective view of historical and literal, political and religious characters, by representing them through images of places and objects which become a mental projection of meanings and associations. “In the works of Nicola Vinci, paradoxically the person portrait is not there, even if the title of the works refers to him: the artist in fact plays on the absence and on a series of allusive references that make what is not visible, clear and tangible by stimulating the imagination and touching the emotional chords of the spectator. Through photographs of uninhabited, empty, decaying interiors, the characters are outlined and the process of identification with the environment represented, starts: each room is a portrait of a man and the few objects present evoke his personality. Nicola Vinci uses photography not as a means of reproducing the reality that is in front of him, but to recreate a new one through the thread of mental associations. Objects, places, environments become something else: interior images of a personal vision of the historical character.” writes Ida Tricoli. So a broken down kitchen and red fireplace become the metaphor of Heinrich Himmler, Pinochet is a run down toilet and sink and the harsh environment spoiled by time and neglect, the metaphor for Pol Pot.
The subjective views of the two artists force the spectator to see these photographs from their point of view, by finding, in the “manufactured” figures of Carla Iacono or in the simple everyday objects and empty environments of Nicola Vinci, the meaning of words and images and their changes; no longer mere representations but inner visions, symbols that transcend beyond ideas and concepts.

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Carla Iacono: lives and works in Genova,. She uses photography and installations as an expressive mediums and has been exhibiting since 2004 in Italy and abroad, often in tandem with her husband, Guido Geerts, who has worked in the Netherlands in the field of advertising photography. Her work focuses on issues like the body and metamorphosis, analyzing the delicate period of adolescence and its "rites of passage", seen as an extraordinary time of growth where the effort to achieve ones own identity is evidenced. She defines herself as a "conceptual" photographer that uses a mixture of dreams, irony, ambiguity and imagination to "reveal" fragments of memory and the unconscious that re-emerge from the depths of the invisible to become visible.

Nicola Vinci: was born in Castellaneta (TA) lives and works in Verona. Photography is the medium that allows him focus on the psychological and emotional development, the relationship with the outside world and the various psychological spaces. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Painting in Bari, his work has been exhibited in various galleries and institutions, as well as in many Italian and international art fairs.

CARLA IACONO, NICOLA VINCI
COSTRUIRE DES HISTORIES

March 18th - April 15th 2012

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