Alessio DELFINO, Flor GARDUNO, Herb LIST, Nicolò PAOLI, Ninni PEPE, Patrick WILLOCQ
Do I love you because you’re beautiful,
or are you beautiful because I love you?
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Cinderella
Opening reception: Thursday, April 27th from 6.30 pm
Duration: April 28th – June 3rd 2017
Location VisionQuesT 4ross0
Piazza Invrea 4 r, 16123 Genova, Italy +39 010 2464203 – +39 335 6195394
From Tuesday to Saturday 3 pm – 7 pm and by appointment
www.visionquest.it – info@visionquest.it
Sir Thomas Overbury in his poem “A Wife” (1613) wrote: All the carnal beauty of my wife is but skin-deep”. But how do we deal with the eternal charm of the flesh and the way it is confused with “subcutaneous” issues, especially with regard to that part of the body that is the most elusive: the soul?
Why do we want to have a beautiful flower at the height of its bloom, if one day it is going to lose its petals? We pursue ephemeron at our own peril. Since ancient times we have tried to live in an alternate universe, bestowing and giving to surface beauty the functional characteristics of an idea, such as the Greeks and Romans did where proportion and harmony were not only signs of beauty, but of goodness and virtue. The kalokagathia represented in fact in the Greek culture of the fifth century BC the ideal of physical and moral perfection. Ages have changed and along with them the standards and ideas of beauty, but their ephemeral qualities have not, because ephemeral are the standards of evaluation.
SKIN DEEP does not want to be a dissertation nor a detailed and in-depth analysis on the aesthetics, the meanings bestowed on the beauty of the flesh, particularly in art, but to offer the exploration, the desiring drive of six modes of vision coming from different worlds and realities that touch the flesh telling us and telling themselves of their experiences and thoughts on the concept of Beauty.
Herb List (Hamburg 1903-1975), one of the leaders of metaphysics photography in which he transferred the influences and suggestions of various artistic currents, from Classicism to the Bauhaus, from Surrealism to the Metaphysical paintings, and the postwar Italian Neorealism. His unmistakable austere and, at the same time, magical style, full of artistic references, has influenced generations of photographers, imprisoning the male body in the most absolute freedom, in a lyricism of neo-realism, in a vortex of blacks and whites that even today after more seventy years, still have the power to move us and make us think. One of the most important exponents of homoerotic photography, List left us with pure and balanced images, full of symbolism, personal positive projections and references to Greek mythology, with the intent to capture the magic of the apparition.
Flor Garduño (Mexico City 1957), loads the exquisite and enigmatic bodies of her female figures, of elements and symbols that belong to nature, such as large leaves, white calla lilies, fruits, feathers, fish, bewitching our sight and retaining an erotic charge that plunges in the thought of man’s relationship with the natural element, like the search for a fusion of our skin with nature, putting back together a lost or seemingly calmed bond and placing it in a dimension where we can make peace with our body and the world. In Hoja Elegant, 1998 (elegant leaf) for example Garduño suggests the link between women and nature: the large leaf with which the body is covering itself, seems to blend so much as to make us ask where does the big leaf end and the body begins? In the search for eternity, or a time without time, is beauty still human or is it divine?
Ninni Pepe, (Fasano Brindisi, 1956) provides in the images that are part of his series “The Form’s Machine”, by photographing his own torso, his belly, that with the imposition of his hands, takes on different symbolic forms, in the vain attempt to exorcise the decay of time, as if, in the words of Denis Curti, to want to embrace: “…. the” chaos “, the” heart “, the” cross “and the ‘”infinite “as some of the elements that the author mimics, describes his own hands and his own belly, giving them new form and meaning. It is as if the irony, the play and imagination bring into the scene the loves and the author’s intimate obsessions, those abstract concepts that fascinate him so much as to make him create the symbolic representation on his own person, through a highly realistic and concise photographic style. Everything then resolves itself on the body and through the body, while the nudity makes the inspirational idea even clearer, purifying it from possible contaminations and from possible aesthetic interferences. Thus the man and the artist’s feelings are expressed through the performance, without filters or mediation, while the camera records the image with the precision of the sharpest black and white. ”
Patrick Willocq, (Strasbourg, 1969) in the “Walé ‘Waleke” images, pays tribute to motherhood, fertility and femininity, observing young mothers, called Walé (primiparous mother) of the Pygmies in the Democratic Republic of Congo, at the time when, having ended the isolation of at least a couple of years due to the birth of their first child, young mothers return to the village. The respecting of various taboos, especially sexual, gives these young Walé a status similar to that of a patriarch. The end insulation is characterized by dances and highly codified ritual songs, which are, in turn, a unique creation for each Walé. Highly competitive rituals based on acquiring more prestige and power than their opponents and increase the honor of the family. When a young mother becomes Walé she acquires a nickname that differentiates her from her rivals and places her in a high position in the eyes of the community. Every day the young woman prepares an elaborate toilette aimed at focusing all the attention on her. A mixture of ngola wooden red powder with palm oil, which she spreads to cover her body along with the sophisticated hairstyles, made of ash, bopokoloko leaves and palm oil, are the way for Walé women to display their beauty, superiority and their uniqueness and distinctiveness.
Alessio Delfino (Savona 1976) with the composition of five works drawn from his new project ex tenebris lux continues to propose his inextricable link with the concept of “writing with light”, with photography as a part of himself, from the time when as a young boy in the dark room, he balanced filters and diaphragms or significantly modulated the precise movements of the Field Camera. In these naked suspended bodies, polished and perfect, we feel something sacred. We come into light and we leave when this light goes out. Can all of this be told in an image written by light? Can we describe that instant when darkness falls and our light ascends, perhaps attracted by a new and stronger brightness? Can a photograph enclose death and life at the same time? Can we show this passage with the diaphanous purity of a body, that has come to light naked and is destined with great dignity, to die out, stripped of all unnecessary signs of its transit on this earth? As the eternal cycle of the seasons, the rise of a body from darkness to light becomes the epiphany in the image of the artist.
Nicolò Paoli (Mirandola, MO 1980) captures female bodies by revaluing the volumes and the temporal becoming, through printing and production techniques, such as the use of metal surfaces, materials and resins uncustomary to photography. The unstoppable oxidation, the chemical reaction, the outcrops of rust, incrustations and the drippings of glues and paints on the image of the skin, on the body, change the surface and its original intent. If photography is to secure, crystallize the moment, Paoli seems to want over turn its nature, contrasting the aspirations of immortality that every artist destines to its work, surrendering it to time.
In its slow but developing progression, the body modifies its shape, appearance, and efficiency. Like a flower, inevitably, losing its petals, a body blooms and, over time, fades. Chasing the seduction of ephemeron makes no sense when beauty is as deep as our skin ……. but we continue to pursue it, perhaps because the possibilities to see, contemplate and enjoy, inherent to art, are usable by everyone, leaving an open opportunity to new interpretations, variations of the art work itself: the social value of Beauty, goes beyond the surface, it can be attributed to both the individual and the community, to the subject and the object, to man and nature, in that incessant search to give meaning to our short existence.