Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is pleased to annouce
IMPOSSIBLE LANDSCAPES
Francesco Cianciotta, Giovanni Guadagnoli, Cosmo Laera, Francesco Nencini, Luca Scarpa
Opening: November 12nd, 2015, from 6.30 PM.
November 13th to January 15, 2016.
By appointment only
Curated by Glenda Cinquegrana.
Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is pleased to present a group show titled Impossible Landscapes, featuring photographers Francesco Cianciotta, Giovanni Guadagnoli, Cosmo Laera, Francesco Nencini and Luca Scarpa. The exhibition illustrates the subject of landscape photography, interpreting it through the eyes of five photographers who carry out the Italian classic genre through a profound reflection on the photographic medium and its potential. It’s seemingly impossible to reconstruct a unique perspective through a kaleidoscope of different points of view.
For Francesco Cianciotta landscape photography represents the starting point from which he tests the limits and the potential of the language of photography, using the mobile phone’s camera as a medium of expression. Cianciotta has worked for several years aiming to bring the use of these typically prêt-à-porter tools into the realm of art photography, and he masters completely the mobile phone’s camera to the point he’s capable to elevate this kind of photography into photography art. In this exhibition, we display some of the most recent works taken in Saudi Arabia, which continues one of his most legendary series devoted to airports titled A Journey Apart.
Giovanni Guadagnoli’s work walks a thin line between reality and photographic fiction, a line that becomes extremely fleeting as part of a philosophical relativist discourse, through which the viewer, when facing his relationship with the reality, is led towards the loss of his visual certainties, aiming to build a new point of view. Each Guadagnoli shot, quoting a text written by Gigliola Foschi, is “a question on the representation from the representation itself, and on photography from photography itself”. On display, there is a shot taken from the Mimesis: declensis series, together with some other works included in a new series devoted to Italy. In these last photographic works, the references to the classic join the mastering of the most recent digital tools, chosen in order to deepen and amplify the images’ inner meanings.
Cosmo Laera is the photographer who’s been mostly influenced by documentary photography’s tradition, rooted in the landscape genre. His pictures are marked by a lucid and rational point of view, dominating and controlling the landscape in every minimal detail, when a skilful mastery of the camera seems capable of revealing the intrinsic beauty of things. This rational vision is softened by use of colour that, tinted with poetic sensibility and a delicacy that doesn’t avoid borrowing from watercolour tones, reminds of the classic paintings of the Eighteenth Century.
The show features a re-edition of a famous series of Francesco Nencini’s photographs, titled Non-Places, a series of shots whose name was inspired by the definition created by the renowned sociologist Marc Augè. They focus on capturing suspended atmospheres, studded with appearances and solitudes typical of the passageways. In these images, by quoting Stefano Pirovano, the sense of impermanence, that he defines as ‘a state of the image that is enriched by the presence of the others’ provides a link between the author’s expressive presence and his attitude of keeping the distance from the subjects. In these pictures, the eye of the photographer takes a step back, as he was spying those human presences in order to depict their secret gestures that constitute the real vocabulary of solitude.
The exhibition also features Luca Scarpa’s Metropolis Urbane series. Inspired by the famous Fritz Lang film, the vision of the city in this series is created through the composition and decomposition of the urban skyline, skilfully playing with multiple exposures tricks that remind us of the pioneering experiments of Italian Futurism and the avant-garde movements in photography during the first part of last century.