project info
If Earth were a human body, the surface of the stone would be her skin with its roughness, transparencies, colors touched by grazing or diffused lights, with its very slow transformations. It would be like an eternal skin, unlike ours, a skin in which the history of humanity as a whole can be traced. You feel like you want to touch it and then sink into its clarity, to look for objects in its folds to recapture thoughts that have always existed in us. For this reason, the negative and the positive interpenetrate, like the perception of an inside and an outside. It is stone, it is matter, it is the skin of nature.
Each stone, granite or marble wall has its own texture. Signs, colors, reliefs, chiaroscuro: my gaze remains hypnotized looking for symbols or figures and imagining messages to build stories. Everything has been shaped by time and winds, tools of an artist in search of his work. These are the winds that inspired the series of this work, which is also part of the larger project on the elements of nature (Mother&Land): Eurus, Boreas, Zephyrus and Notus. The names of the first known winds, ranging from North to South, from East to West of the world. I photographed every detail and every image, I inverted in negative and reflected horizontally to build an "entire" diptych, forming new symbols and new figures. The negative and positive together summarize the concept of the point of view that I adopted in my work on the environment: on the one hand the present, on the other a future that reflects a planet that no longer exists. The stone is alive, it speaks to us, envelops us, helps us and I am firmly convinced that we must do the same, we must protect it and it protects our life. My artistic work is once again permeated by my fil rouge between life and art: a better world is possible. I have always photographed every stone in which my eyes have dwelled, and the images come from distant times and distant places: analog and digital, negative and positive.
In designing this work it was not my master photographers or painters who inspired me, at least in an evident way, but instead were passages and poems, by authors dear to me and known but also poems that I have written myself over the years. Words, feelings, values translated into images. Each time I caress and look at the earth as if it were a human being...
Eurus, the East wind that brings autumn, sees the prevalence of soft colors, darker skies and leaves that wither until they disappear. Here, too, the images were taken in Chile, the Dominican Republic and Portugal.
Boreas, the North wind that brings winter, whose images were taken in Chile and Portugal, has notes of green and pink that recall the end of autumn and the fading of colors.
Notus, the South wind that brings summer; most of the photographs were taken in Egypt, others in Iran and Greece, is a whirlwind of colors, as if the colored walls of the Sinai had launched towards the North of the world to bring the energy of the sun.
Zephyrus, the West wind that brings spring, whose images come mainly from Spain, is recalled by the blue of the clear sky and the yellow of the warming sun.
awards
IPA 2010 Honorable Mention Category Fine Art
PX3 Official Selection Prix de la Photographie 2011 Category Fine Art/Abstract
press review
agenziaradicale.com text by Giovanni Lauricella (italian)
press release