Works of Alchemy
“What tricks me enormously is the exceptional capacity that photosensitive matter has in dramatically manipulating anything it may touch”.
The artistic action of Paolo Gioli rises from the exceptional encounter of light and matter: the images of a researcher of the vision between photography, cinema and painting. A big exhibition about the work by Paolo Gioli will be open from September 24th to November 14th.
Here, in the hit between light and matter, the photographic and artistic action takes place. The Galleria del Cembalo dedicates a wide exhibition to this work, by means of about eighty pieces.
Explorer of the vision, Gioli came to photography and cinema after passing through painting when he was very young. In each field he found a personal path, which escapes from all kind of categorization.
The proposed exhibition fully gives light to all the aspects of his work and, after the one held in Palazzo delle Esposizioni in 1996, it can be considered the first show in Rome representing the three visual worlds: photography, cinema and painting.
Drawings from the sixties, tableau from the seventies, as well as the movies, facing here in the exhibition the series of photos – Unknowns, Chests, Luminescents, Faces through – Gioli’s work is very much about the physicity of human figure, suggesting from time to time visions that can be defined neoclassical, dadaist, pop, baroque, renaissance, and still maintaining an extraordinary coherence of approach and of tuning.
In the work of Paolo Gioli research often meets creation: as a result, we see a kind of photography which doesn’t mean to reproduce reality, but in which technical attitude turned into knowledge leads to “being essential as a mental and esthetical protocol, used as an instrument to find the origin of photography and obtaining results otherwise unachievable”, as Giuliano Sergio wrote.
The pinhole camera used to catch images without a camera, as far as the extraordinary conception of the photo-finish, the unprecedented use of the beloved Polaroid – moist incunabulum of modern history – or the re-elaboration of “found” images, tells us about the absolute originality of process, alchemy never having an end in itself, posing the rigorous artist’s discipline at the service of an almost absolute freedom of the creative action.
“The Polaroid – said Paolo Gioli – transfers as a fresco layer. The image, then detached from its reactant, from its negative, as skin from the flesh, looses its fixing glaze, which instead is absorbed by the fabric’s weave or by the paper’s thickness. I like this transfer on such noble and antique materials, a matter that is the triumph of the immediate consumption, of pornography and of the family memory. Between the detachment and the deposit on the new material, I can easily interfere a creative parasite”.
The exhibition comes together with the book Paolo Gioli. Abuses. Il corpo delle immagini, Peliti Associati editions.
“The use of the pinhole camera in photography as well as in cinema – is written in one of the texts in the book – the ability of transferring the highly sophisticated matter of Polaroid images on supports as silk, wood and paper by means of an engraving technique, has value not only in the history of the photographic technique, but opens new possibilities of expressive contaminations”.
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