Photography

My approach to photography stems from a contrast between two ways of representing the subjects that appeal to me. On the one hand, the need to understand what appears before my eyes, a fascination with the beauty and usefulness of a didactic representation of things – also dictated, I believe, by the editorial and commercial context for which I often take commissions. On the other hand, the need for an abstraction of reality – a kind of inability to accept things as they are, by intervening and forcing a constantly new gaze on familiar subjects. Sometimes, these strands can meet by chance, producing the images that fascinate me the most. In the last seven years, working on editorial assignments, alongside my personal work, I decided to partly demystify the situations related to the commercial work I was doing, many of which were linked to experiments, new technologies, industrial and highly automated processes. I have used the photographic medium to break down what I was looking at, working on the aesthetics of functionality, seeking simpler concepts that were simultaneously magical and mellow, easier to associate with my childhood memories.

References (art, literature, music, other) / Artistic crossovers and contaminations

My first contact with the image was through the paintings and illustrations I observed, as a child, in my parents’ house. They were hoarders of reproductions of 20th century paintings, of which I remember the colours of Virgilio Guidi, De Chirico, Dalí. I believe that a certain kind of predisposition for classicism, timeless beauty, and melancholy started taking shape there and then. Later came the fascination with photography, with the great American portraitists, with the New Objectivity movement and the Bauhaus school – discovering at university that there were those who had already been able to distil information, magic, and mystery into images of subjects that could be defined as ordinary. Today, I have perhaps come closer to the pictorial work of Georgia O’Keeffe, Vita Celmins or Natalie du Pasquier. In search of subjects that are ‘self-explanatory’ in their apparent simplicity, be it concrete or abstract.

Research methodology

My work navigates between the inside and the outside. Between the studio and the field. I find myself at ease in the interaction between the two spaces, in the mutual contamination. I can be attracted to an object that I picked up in the street, and then explore it in the studio, completely taken out of context. Conversely, I like to experiment by intervening on the external reality, treating it as a space controlled by artificial lighting that I manage. The non-methodology that I come upon most frequently in my work is some kind of obsession with the transformation of things.