Project Descriptions
Cars
"Cars" is a photographic series about mimesis. Cadillacs, Hondas or Fords are nothing but escamotage for city portraits. While reality disappears under the weight of digital interpretation, one of the founding pillars of photography is here subverted. The focusing technique, applied to bring out any given subject from its environment, is no longer working. As the foreground becomes the background, the background becomes the foreground. The eyes wander through the images looking for a center of attention that cannot be found. Small details, otherwise unnoticed, come to the fore, while the cars become part of the city structure.
Anatomy of a Vase
Anatomy of a Vase is a work about digital realism. A series of variations on the theme, the reproduction of a glass vase.
In one image we see a man-made product, in the other ones we observe automatic aesthetics, result of mathematical calculation. On a computer screen, photography is always subject to change, always provisional. The possibilities of manipulation of the physical world are infinite, carrying deep questions about our collective perception of reality.
But this transformative process, once printed on paper, is finally blocked. The digital figures, freed from the monitor limits, are transferred into the real world. They are now Objects.
Homes and Buildings
Homes and Buildings are parallel projects about the archetypical forms in architecture. The images mix layers of concrete reality and digital abstraction, revealing geometry as the grammar of the architectural language. After a reduction process of visual information, once functional elements have been removed, the constructions appear as pure geometrical solids.
If architecture is „inhabited sculpture”, as Constantin Brancusi stated, I am exploring this essential aspect of construction through the photographic medium. By creating buildings which seem uninhabitable, I aim to raise questions about function and accessibility of architecture in both public and private space.
Archetypes
Archetypes is a sculptural study about the basics of architecture and construction. Their foundation consists of the elements of the Euclidean geometry. As Werner Oechslin wrote: "All areas of philosophy, including ethics, have repeatedly striven to achieve the ancient More Geometrico, which stands for scientific reliability, systematic methodology, and conclusiveness”.
Contemplating geometrical solids remind some of the main objects of meditation, the Platonic solids. The minimized elegance of forms and colours, the "beautiful symmetry", are depicted in this photographic work through small sculptures resembling those used by children to learn the art of building.
Photosynthesis
In Photosynthesis a new series of plants has been created, widening the spectrum of classified botanical typologies. As we are used to see and imagine plants as green, the relation between the colours and the shapes of these new species challenge our vision of the natural world.
Furthermore, in a digital environment, this work creates a perceptional visual gap: what might be seen at a first glance as a simple digital manipulation is, in fact, the result of a process of gouache painting on decorative plastic plants.
Mountains
Mountains discusses our relationship to nature through a temporary sculpture made out of a transparent, polluting product generated by humans. Mountains have been charged with symbolic elements by every civilisation; the aspiration to a superior dimension often seemed to get realisable by the fatigue of rising to the highest peaks.
There is little as solid as a mountain in our collective imagination. But this mountain is not a mountain, rather it is the idea of it. Beyond the weightless layers of plastic bags, we glimpse an empty grey background of possibilities.