19 december 2009 > 28 february 2010




curated by Nicola Davide Angerame and Paolo Erbetta

“It’s as if photography allows me to see the photographer’s legends, fraternizing with them but not quite believing in them”. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida


The Paolo Erbetta Gallery is presenting a double personal exhibition of recent works by Alessio Delfino (1976 Savona) and Chiara Coccorese (1982 Naples), two artists who “play” with photography in both a literal and metaphorical sense: “literal” because both enjoy focusing energy on creating their own sets; “metaphorical” because when photography’s natural objective reproduction of reality is put up for discussion photography itself becomes a projection of interiority.

Tarots is the new photographic series by Alessio Delfino, dedicated to the twenty-two major arcana cards of the Marseilles tarot deck, in the version commissioned during the first half of the 15th century by the Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, that represents the highest expression of the tarot cards over the centuries.
In more than a decade of work, this young photographer from Savona has focused his artistic spotlight on the woman. In Tarots, the strength of the symbol is interwoven with the seductive power of the body. The L’Imperatrice is the first photograph of this “knowledgeable” search that interprets the tarot cards from a feminine perspective. Man is subjugated to destiny, as he is to the eternal feminine, that first relinquishes control and then takes it back in a seesawing interplay. In the Le Diable a man is subjugated to a woman’s power. In a laic society that exalts the self-made man, the concept of destiny does not have much of a following. Through a pop operation, Delfino finds a way to talk about that “fate” that for centuries represented a real cultural obsession for man. In point of fact, without Fate ancient poems, Greek tragedy, astrology and much more, including the Tarot cards, would not exist. This is the origin behind Delfino’s femme fatale of the Tarots. Through the Neo-Baroque style, Delfino’s photography talks about a world understood as a “great representation” and about life as a path of more or less voluntary and conscious subjugation to the power of the symbolic. This is done by linking some points of reference, including Erwin Olaf, Helmut Newton and David LaChapelle. If Delfino admires the first’s vintage, elegant, evocative and mysterious atmospheres, he appreciates the second one’s use of models with post-feminist beauty and heightened awareness, with aggressive, decisive, managerial and even sadistic features. For the last reference, Delfino infers instead an evident gusto for playing, mischievousness and a Baroque mannerism that if in LaChapelle are represented by the celebrated ultra-pop and mannerist excesses, in Delfino remain subdued to avoid upsetting the balance imposed by the seraphic inspiration of the cards of fate. A flatus voci, that of the L'Imperatrice, that bursts from a post-modern symbiosis in which photography exploits all its potential to create a space in which the senses and symbols waft with dramatic lightness, without losing the depth of an original feeling and without plunging into the outdated pomp of rhetoric. As pointed out by Roland Barthes in one of his fundamental books, for the observer “it is as if” photography “allows him to see the photographer’s legends, fraternizing with them but not quite believing in them”. Delfino’s photography produces exactly such an effect of non-violent fascination, of playful seduction, of serious hilarity, allowing the image to be interpreted at various levels.

Instead, in the previous series Femmes d’or, Delfino elaborates an abstraction and dramatization of the nude. After having dedicated two series to the transformation of the body into a landscape and to the transfiguration of the flesh into tenuous traces of light, Delfino ventures into a series in which he uses gold body painting on non-professional models to present a different texture of the skin and to establish another relationship between flesh, light and photography. Trapped inside thick gilded frames, the consequences of a certain Baroque taste for the extreme, these fragments of dancing bodies become voluptuous and dramatic objects. The ethereal consistency of the masses, the plasticity of the corporeal volumes and the harmony of the forms create sculptural photography, in which the body assumes a spiritual value. The corporeal fragment enhances the perception of the expressivity of the whole, keeping eroticism at a proper distance, a situation that Delfino remedies by “denuding the nude”, removing all symbolic references while seeking a more authentic form and a truer vitality for the body.

If Delfino’s world focuses on the ideas from an ancient and now vanished world that believes in beauty as harmony and in destiny as a “book” that has already been written, the world of Chiara Coccorese concentrates instead on another place in which the “myth” survives. This is the comfortable and disturbing world of fairy-tales. Through a stage photography-based narrative approach, Coccorese reconstructs a world using the dream-like language of infancy. This stage of existence is characterized by a gnoseological approach to play: a personal universe is constructed in which the real one is repeated over and over to make it more familiar, playing within it as if it could be available, and tamable. The mythicizing focus is needed to embellish and personify the “four seasons”, for example, in order to create an anthropological link with nature, indifferent to destiny and to human suffering, and of which Giacomo Leopardi left an absolute legacy in his Dialog between Nature and an Icelander.
In this reconstruction, the artist gets involved through a flurry of activity with mirrors that reflect her image. A conceptual aspect of photography that provides a surreal vision, that is amused and fun, but that seeks contact with the more ideal aspects of taking pictures: authoriality, the relationship between the subject and the subject being photographed and the presence of the artist in the work. As we learned from Diego Velàzquez’s auroral masterpiece, Las Meninas, the artist can become part of a work through a gaze that makes the artist’s authoritativeness evident. Coccorese does this in Autunno (Autumn), in which she represents a female character immersed in an autumn-like scene. The backdrop is painted, the trees are made of fruits and berries, the soil is covered with dry leaves and walnuts, and the woman is made out of wood. Everything is fake so that it is real. Here, the idea of the puppet is put on center stage in a game for which the artist is the dues ex machina, the designer of scenery with the characteristics of a narration that take us nowhere, like a fairy-tale that is partially spun and should be read between the lines, such as the crucified Scarecrow, rather than to be taken for what it is. We expect a story, but the works by Coccorese are connected to a visionary concept that opens a dimension of narration that links the apprehension of a dream and the simplicity of the fairy-tale to a certain infantile symbolism. Coccorese illustrates the chapters of a story that unravels like a dream, like a destructured fable, in which the characters and landscapes no longer stay together but each goes its own way. A world of colors like in The Chocolate Factory, directed by that Tim Burton to whom Coccorese might have drawn on for inspiration if her work had leaned decidedly toward the grotesque instead of toward a more genuine dramatic and playful mood that brings it closer to the theater of the Italian masks that, in the authentic Neapolitan tradition, is teeming with colors and characters.
Coccorese’s photography starts from where Andy Warhol ended and from that awareness that stage photography has developed, confirming the intention of artists to photograph worlds that they themselves have created. The end of the image “caused by too many images” as predicted by Warhol, who silk-screened photographs “stolen” from the mass media, leads to the end of photography conceived as a tale of what is real and to the birth of a new world described so nicely by a “photographer juggler” like Vik Muniz, through the saying: “There is nothing more to photograph. If you want to photograph something new, you first have to create it”. It is the birth of a photography that records a world created especially for it, often for just one click of the shutter.


Nicola Davide Angerame

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Paolo Erbetta Gallery
Italy - 71100 - Foggia
Via IV Novembre, 2
+39 0881 723493
www.galleriapaoloerbetta.it

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Wed and Thu by appointment.