| Contemporary photography is more interesting the more it deals with death, not merely putting it on, but capturing it shiver in its own cuts, in its colours. The cut performed on the image by the camera is the same performed on life. Alessia Bianco, as proved in her recent exhibition at Sesto Senso in Bologna, points out clearly to be aware of the many implications hidden in simple gestures. She shows photographs of people in their everyday life, in natural light, sometimes with altered exposure. There are no tricks, no Photoshop, no technicality. |  |
Rare Shots – Emilio Corti
Contemporary photography is more interesting the more it deals with death, not merely putting it on, but capturing it shiver in its own cuts, in its colours. The cut performed on the image by the camera is the same performed on life. Alessia Bianco, as proved in her recent exhibition at Sesto Senso in Bologna, points out clearly to be aware of the many implications hidden in simple gestures. She shows photographs of people in their everyday life, in natural light, sometimes with altered exposure. There are no tricks, no Photoshop, no technicality. She uses the camera with the dexterity of a craftsman and reaches the point each time, each time differently, but always fanciful yet sharp, without circumvolutions.
She had her apprenticeship in Italy and in England, then she felt the urge to spend some years in Croatia, her mother’s homeland, to get rid of the clichés of our art practice. She found her freedom of language, approaching art with new eyes and with an insight that is uncommon by now in our country, “everybody here is cloning himself” but has a wide, cosmopolitan value. She quotes Edward Hopper, as he said that his aim was to use nature as a means to appoint on the canvas his intimate reactions towards the object, as it appeared in the moment he loved it the most.
The remarkable fact is that, by doing so, she roots back to the great original Italian realism that finds its source down in artists like Giotto and Masaccio. The suffering, natural or sensuous features of the people she represents, shown on clear, homogeneous coloured backgrounds (walls, bathroom tiles, kitchen towels) have astonishingly the same expressions, the same eyes, the sharp shadows we can find in the great masters of early Renaissance. This affinity comes from an intuitive knowledge of the bare human nature, in its infinite grace, free from all superimpositions. She knows and captures with ease the sensuality of every subject she represents. The cut she gives to her images is basic for the construction of her world: it is a matter of inches; some parts of the figure are cut off, to give a sense of precariousness, the palpitating essence of the unknown. The photographs are conceived and exhibited in short series of few elements, as kind of quasi-cinematographic sketches, they bring stories inside, hint at something that we all seem to know, yet we don’t. It is pure, simple photography, but it brings in itself the results of an elaborate philosophy of the work itself, in balance between photography and cinema, that reaches nevertheless the surface with immediacy and without hesitation.
The bodies are sometimes half-naked, in puzzling domestic interiors, they avoid the commonplaces of a nude, yet caress the pearly atmosphere with their shivering skin. The concept of the whole work is expressed roughly through cuts and colours: there is a conceptual grace in the way colours repeat themselves and cuts link one another. There is an ambiguity between pose and simplicity that causes everything to be obsessively penetrating. These people are not sitting yet are not natural. It is an overturned slice of time. The colours are dumb and soft, like in Damien Hirst’s jelly fleshes, opaque and pearly. She claims influences from Nan Goldin to Ryan McGinley, but her particular realism makes her characters reach the viewer with the throb of their naked essence. Her shots are not loud, not noisy nor winking to fashion and thus belong to the essential and graceful tradition of Italian art.
