Beyond Images

2016

“Men have created an image of everything”
(The angel Raphaela speaking to the angel Cassiel in Faraway, So Close by Wim Wenders,1993)

 

The visible has been completely mapped, our planet is covered with images and we live immersed and overexposed to images: reality is seen, confused and understood with them.

We are constantly engaged in a practice of interpretation and re-consideration of second, third, fourth order realities, where images have become a substantial part of the visible real, the skin of Real that we address photographically. Is there anything unseen left to be photographed “out there”, anything to be looked beyond the veil of the existing images?

In my opinion the heart of the problem is the Subject: he who sees, how he sees and, above all: what he actually sees. In Photography the symbolic relationship is no longer based on the umbilical cord connecting the image to its referent, instead it is between the image and the gaze of the person who stands before, becoming an active and aware part of its essence and existence. I am interested in the Reality of the Image, that which is charged with meaning in the present time of experience: it is as it happens. The work pertains to the individual and his awareness: the artist is the medium between Reality and Subject. The image is a vibrating threshold between elsewhere and present, the invisible underlies the visible: images are their symbolic forms of interpretation.

I wish to explore the very fine line between seeing and thinking, the threshold that connects and separates these two fundamental aspects of our visual understanding of reality. My focus is on the boundary that defines our mental and perceptual interaction with the Real, therefore the crucial role that the beholder plays in the relationship between what the photographer saw and what the viewer is seeing. The picture is a new reality, at the same times a symbolic place of contact and experience: ultimately the surface where two different gazes and thoughts can meet for the very first time.

In my photographs the subject is unclear, often veiled and ambiguous. Photography is the perfectly imperfect medium that can only represent the Skin of Reality, the first, literal and fundamental layer of many others that are covered and not directly visible. I sense that we are never -in front of the things-, or perhaps we have been there all the time, but their names and appearances are absolutely unclear. This is the reason why although we are granted visual access to the objects of Reality, we need to interpret their appearance and reach our idea of truth which is, nonetheless, always beyond and elsewhere, no matter how close we feel we may have come to it. I trust that art can bring us very close to our idea of truth and to the awareness of our human impossibility to grasp the actual way things are, that we’ll never reach and fully understand until the day when we shall finally know, know again?

 

We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the very first time.

T.S. Eliot, from Little Gidding, in Four Quartets, 1943.