alessio delfino

Rêves | Dreams @ Paolo Erbetta Gallery Berlin

Alessio Delfino, “Rêves|Dreams”

The Paolo Erbetta Gallery is pleased to present the solo show of the Italian artist Alessio Delfino entitled “Rêves|Dreams”. Born in Savona in 1976, he works between Savona and Milan. Delfino devoted himself to photography from a young age; a great curiosity about the operation of the darkroom pushes him to deepen through studies of chemistry the many possibilities of using the photographic medium. From his earliest works he chose to direct his works towards the creation of photographic series, in order to better express his artistic research without synthesizing it in a single shot. In fact, he does not seek a “decisive moment” at Henry Cartier-Bresson, but explores the almost cinematic representation of the flow of time through images that seem to evoke the unstoppable nature of time, irreducible in a single photograph.

“Rêves|Dreams”, title of the series on display, tries to express Delfino’s dream of capturing, through photography, not the rigidity of reality, but its infinite possibilities. Photography is used by Delfino not as a tool of faithful reproduction of reality, nor as an effigy-synthesis of time, but as a stratification of several moments, obtaining images of bodies that return the incessant movement of life, proposing, through the overlap of several shots, a fusion of times and multiple spaces. He skilfully reworks a theme that since the relatively early advent of photography has interested many artists and photographers, from the pioneer Muybridge to the cubist avant-garde, or the rendering, in two-dimensional, image, nature of life, or the dynamism and three-dimensionality of space and time. The series “Rêves|Dreams” investigates and confuses space, time, reality and dream; the images reveal parts of the female body, but it is not the clarity of detail that interests Delfino, but the confused, nuanced, undefined form; characteristic of the dream. In fact, in addition to trying to immortalize the position of a body in the second in which this position no longer exists, he fixes his dream on cotton paper, which helps mark the ethereal shape of these figures that seem drawn in pencil or pastel. The figures blend with the opaque background, towards uncertain, undefined shades, confirming an elusive reality, or rather, a dream that is destined to vanish when the observer looks away.

Delfino’s research is therefore directed to the rendering of the plurality and variety of the present, also confirmed by the choice of the female naked body, which also aims to evoke the multiple essence of creative nature, but this research is possible only in a limbo, in a fleeting, ethereal, dreamlike dimension.