Home of the Unknown

Photographs are stable, still images,
Humans transient, impermanent entities.

Pictures are partial,
Representations elusive.
They cannot capture the actual, real self.

Yet images allude
To the essence we long,
The loss and the wholeness we strive for.

Are we unique,
Scattered, sparse fragments
Of a greater, unreachable image?

By will and experience,
By chance and through choice,
Is there a fulfillment to our irremissible quest?

For Us,
The principle,
The root and the problem,
The known and the unknown,
I wonder: who are

We.

Artist’s statement

The appearance of things is deceiving, their aspect elusive. What I see, the retinal image that I can grasp indicates only the first layer of what is visible, the skin of reality: the first level of its infinite complexity and the root of manifold visual interpretations. The phenomena that we witness are products of our consciousness, perception and projection: this clear illusion we call reality.

Photography bases its investigation on the physical data of reality, a codified transcription marked by traces of light shaped onto a fixed sensitive support. A photograph is a multilayered text to be read and deciphered, it may contain an inexhaustible reserve of understandings: all meanings are contained within its boundaries and present to be discovered and revealed. New interpretations may spring from the depth of the apparently flat surface of the image, rendered manifest through a hermeneutic process. Although we shall never grasp the true way things are, photography is an open source, an endlessly rich means of investigation and discovery.

I have worked with the medium of photography for a long time investigating manifold forms of reality from different points of view, aspects and positions. Along this quest I have developed an increasingly non-representational, almost abstract approach to transcend the first and essential layer of visible reality.

I wonder how the literal vision of photography can explore the depth of what cannot be seen directly; how this inherently limited medium, bound and dependent upon the appearance of what is manifest, may offer a way to trespass its boundaries and allude to what is beyond, elsewhere, perhaps invisibly there.

My exhibition US addresses these ideas and explores them through a subject that I’ve always found extremely problematic, if not almost prohibitive to approach: the human figure. The more I look at us, the more I wonder who we are. I have come to the conclusion that we are the problem and the solution to the problem, and the responsible act of pointing the camera towards us may offer a new insight and a different perspective to this endless quest.

The identity of my subjects is unclear and their names unknown; these photographs are visible forms of the questions I pose. I’m asking the audience to assume a fundamental role in completing my work, which I conceive as an open platform presented to the viewer. I sense that the answers are primarily embedded in the glance of the beholder, his active position and experience. Ultimately the picture is the medium between the Subject and the Other, the vessel to communicate in either direction: a threshold to trespass.