Artist: Alessio Delfino
Title: Rêves
Date: 20 June 2013 – 10 July 2013
Gallery: Kips Gallery New York
Opening: June 20 , 6 – 8 PM
Opening hours: Tuesday / Saturday 11- 18 (tel. gallery +1 (212) 242-4215 or +1(646)284-5008 to book visits)
Exhibition curated by: Nicola Davide Angerame
For interviews Nicola Davide Angerame +39 346 4711759 – american mobile phone +1 347 657 4184 nicola.angerame@gmail.com alessio@alessiodelfino.com
Kips Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the third solo exhibition of Alessio Delfino in New York on June 20, 2013 from 6 pm to 8 pm. The Italian artist and photographer will present to the public some large-format works dedicated to the new photographic series entitled “Rêves”.
Alessio Delfino (1976) is a photographer who is establishing himself on the Italian and international scene also thanks to important presences of his work in international collections (one of which the VAF Stiftung is now on display at the MART in Rovereto and features works by Delfino on display), as well as international exhibitions, including the 54th Venice Biennale, where he was invited to the Italian Pavilion.
In this 2013, Alessio Delfino boasts a series of prestigious international solo exhibitions. Important art galleries in Paris, Brussels, New York and Berlin will exhibit the two latest series of works: Tarots and Rêves.
Delfino’s work will also be present at the second most important art fair in Korea, the Art Fair Busan that will open on June 4, 2013.
Delfino’s photography exalts the female body as a key image for a broader discourse on reality, dreams, human perception and the possibilities of the photographic medium.
After presenting Metamorphoseis and Tarots, Delfino exhibited the new series in New York at the Kips Gallery, located in the prestigious Chelsea gallery area of Manhattan.
Presentation of the exhibition and curriculum of Alessio Delfino.
Appreciated photographer, both nationally and internationally, Alessio Delfino (Savona, 1976) presents in New York the new photographic series “Rêves”.
Delfino continues her search for a photograph that can describe the multiform identity of the female without thematizing it as an “erotic object” but using it as a metaphor or symbol of ethical-aesthetic discourses (as in the series Metamorphoseis), esoteric (as in the Tarots series) or formal and psychological (as in this latest Rêves series).
Delfino creates scenes in which the “dancing” bodies of models are used as metaphors of the mental processes involved in the dream and memory. The artist thus obtains compositions that are the result of an organic fusion of different yet homogeneous moments. This series of works dialogues with the noble fathers of moving photography, such as Eadweard Muybridge, but also with the cubofuturist painting of Picasso and Balla and with the Duchamp of “Nude Descending the Stairs“.
The peculiarity of this work is also given by the fact that each photographic image is a “unique work”, as is the case in painting.
Like the artist himself maintains about his latest series of works: “The dream sometimes manifests in us the most remote desires, is the synthesis of an emotional path, the key to a better knowledge of ourselves. The border between dream and desire is often blurred, merging into a dance often incomprehensible but at the same time irresistible”.
As the critic and curator, Nicola Davide Angerame, writes in the introductory text of the catalogue of the New York exhibition: “The photograph expressed by Alessio Delfino in Rêves launches into a fusion of different times and spaces, using the body as viaticum, as a guide image useful to bring it into a multidimensionality in which it is possible to unhinge the rigidity of reality to accomplish the alchemical task of synthesizing not the real but its conditions of possibility: those “pure a priori forms of sensitivity” which the German philosopher Immanuel Kant describes as conditions of the possibility of perception. Space and Time”.
As the philosopher Alessandro Bertinetto writes: “With his Rêves, Delfino takes us into a world where the natural forms evoked by the great German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel open to the universe. Indeed, they open themselves up in the human universe, especially in women. The bodies bloom like flowers, tangle like ivy, fit like the legs of fascinating arachnids. Silent and auratic examples of a fantastic, mythical morphology, Delfino’s works want to continue the work of a naturans nature that never ceases to form new forms and amaze us”.
Multiplicity in Alessio Delfino’s Rèves
by Nicola Davide Angerame
Go beyond photography by staying in it. Concentrate multiple times and spaces within a single shot. Face the multiplication of bodies with “frontier” spirit. So Eadweard Muybridge in his experiments of dynamic photography in the late nineteenth century opens the door to a new dimension, which will then be developed by cubists and futurists in an attempt to make entirely, in the two-dimensional pictorial image (and photographic)space and time within their dynamic and three-dimensional nature.
These avant-garde intuitions are coeval with the origins of cinema, that is, the art of moving image (of sound and body). But cinema is a flow: it reproduces the truth of the eye that flows over the things of the world, making roundups, enlargements, montages with sound. The avant-garde, instead, want to capture this dynamism in the stillness of the picture, forcing the body to fragment, to reproduce, to repeat itself equal and different from itself. They attempt an alchemy, an “impossible” synthesis of different moments, based on their seriality. They want to forge an unlikely “contemporaneity” by stopping the time line and refracting space into a multi-dimensionality. Alchemists and magicians of painting, these artists: from Balla to Picasso, from Boccioni to Braque. Even Marcel Duchamp, at the beginning of his conceptual career that coincides with the end of his identity as a painter, paints a famous Nu descendant un escalier (Nude descending the stairs),1912. In it the father of the ready made will come to the understanding of how the synthesis of times, spaces and bodies is an “impossible” work and will choose the way of conceptual, that is, an approach to art and perception that remains naturalistic and that leads him to transfer real objects in the immutable temporality of the museum.
Today, at a time when cinema welcomes the third dimension and begins to discover the 5 dimensions (linked to the further senses of smell and touch) photography is still relegated to the golden cage of two-dimensional. Famous schools like those of Düsseldorf assure it of its documentary potential and the inexhaustible strength that comes to it from its reproduction of the real as it is/appears. Pure, simple, frontal. This alleged objectivity, imperceptibly slips instead towards the status of icon. Today we celebrate a water tower of the Beckers, or a view of the Andreas Gursky supermarket, as if they were not only images taken from a reality that is placed within a specific time and space, but as if they were imperishable visions capable of synthesizing the sense of an era or a civilization. These images are not only a document of our living here and now are icons of a world: they are “the part for the whole” that tries to synthesize the life that flows, copious and complex, often out of its banks. Photography tries to build these banks, deciding what to show us, at what time and in what place.
The photograph that Alessio Delfino expresses in his latest series of works takes charge of all the issues mentioned above and with an aesthetic twist, free from conceptual or scholastic concerns, intuits that the time and space of photography can be much more than the simple definition of the medium, as reproducer of reality, allows you to get.
Thus he launches himself into a fusion of different times and spaces, using the body as viaticum, as a guide image useful to bring it into a multidimensionality in which it is possible to unhinge the rigidity of reality to accomplish the alchemical task of synthesizing not the real but its conditions of possibility: those “pure a priori forms of sensitivity” which the German philosopher Immanuel Kant describes as conditions of the possibility of perception. Space and time.
In his capital work The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant devotes many pages to these intuitions as well of the inner sense (time) and the outer sense (space). All our knowledge can only start from them and their “continuity” is the specific form within which we perceive everything, as well as the guarantee that something can be experienced.
Delfino’s simultaneous, folded, layered and molten photography opts instead for an exfoliation of temporal and spatial planes, thus obtaining images of impossible bodies. Its construction of an unreality is not so much given by a simple overlap but by the fusion of time and space, and therefore of different movements, positions and morphologies of the body taken in analysis as under the magnifying glass of a magician or an alchemist in search of a philosopher’s stone able, not to turn the pewter into gold, but to synthesize the flow of time and the one-dimensionality of space in an incandescent image capable of disrupting our common sense, based on the a priori forms of our perception.
Today’s quantum physics is demonstrating, through string and superstring theory, that parallel universes would exist and that the same subatomic particle could easily have “at the same time” two or more positions. Which means something incomprehensible to us, accustomed to the “punctuality” of time and space. To go beyond this cognitive limit, art can help.
His superiority (in this case of photography) is the prerogative of being able to give “body, image and figure” to something that logically is for us “incomprehensible”.
Our access to the world of imagination becomes a way to imagine the unthinkable. The magmatic bodies built by Delfino are like those “photographs” taken recently at the Higgs boson. A hypothetical image that tries to give a visible body (in the common sense as in the quantum one) to a reality of which we do not have a direct perception but that it is almost necessary to think that it exists.
With this series of works, Delfino places another theme at the center of his multi-year reflection on the body muliebre classically understood as a canon of beauty, harmony and, respectively, to the different series of works that precede Rèves, as a symbol of fertility, of divinity, fate and destiny. This theme is that of the plurality of the body.
Is one body also a single body? Perhaps not, if we accept the hypothesis that our own identity is actually a stratification and fusion of different Selves, which are found in a subjectivity as in a photo of Delfino or as in a quantum scheme. We are ourselves to the extent that we now reflect one, now the other of our natures. Often the coexistence of different Selves is problematic. The layered structure of the Id, Io and Super-Io is a first decoding of this ubiquity of the Self, which constantly slips between its own drives, the moral imperatives introjected with education, taboos and the choice that must constantly operate in the waking state. In this case too, art comes to meet us by giving a body to this paradoxical situation of dynamic stasis. Like the subjects portrayed by Delfino, our interiority is in perpetual motion. Quietness does not belong to our ego, because its multiple nature finds rest only in a few situations, however never definitive. And the body, with its flowering and decadence, offers us a refuge forced to share our destiny. Perhaps he himself is our destiny.
While philosophy has mortified the body by treating it as a waste product of spiritual and intellectual life, art has celebrated it as a divine thing (think of the centuries-old portraiture of the body of Christ). Still in the twentieth century, body art has placed it in the foreground as a work of art tout court. There is only the photograph of the bodies: condemnation and delight of photography. That of Delfino is photography of the body to the nth degree, of a body that comes out of its border and shows itself its power: every body is plural. He himself is an assembly of organs, a symphony of functionality, a sum of expressions.
Bodies that look like rocks, gods, trees. Bodies that Delfino’s photograph cools down after the magmatic explosion of movement. Defigurated bodies, deprived of their natural boundaries and redesigned according to the polysemy typical of the poetics of Delfino. In it lies the value of a proposal that plays with space, with time and with the body as a juggler or a Prestidigitatore. Like an alchemist or a magician: to tell us that the I is an Us dancing in perpetuity. Perhaps, in different dimensions.