Alessio Delfino
Rêves
crated by Viana Conti
Opening Saturday, 9th April 2016 at 6 pm
the artist will be present
10 april – 3 june 2016
Piazza Invrea 4r – 16123 Genova – Italy +39 0102476642 +39 3356195394 – www.visionquest.it – info@visionquest.it
VisionQuesT contemporary photography is pleased to present the solo show of Alessio Delfino “Rêves” (Dreams).
Alessio Delfino’s great interest in photography and the procedures of the darkroom led him from a young age to want to deepen, through his studies of chemistry, the different possibilities. Already from the first works he chooses to direct his artistic research towards the realization of photographic series and not to its synthesis through a single image. He does not aspire to the “decisive moment” in the sense of Henri Cartier-Bresson, but pursues an almost cinematic representation of the flow of time through images that apparently want to evoke its inexorable nature and therefore cannot be reduced to a single shot.
With great ability Delfino develops themes that have interested many artists and photographers since the dawn of photography, from the “pioneer” Muybridge to the avant-garde cubists: the interpretation of images, the nature of life, and, moreover, the dynamics and three-dimensionality of space and time within the two-dimensional nature of photography.
In the images on display space, time, reality and dreams come to life not through the clarity of detail but in the dark, blurred and indeterminate forms that are characteristic of the dream, as to want to capture not the rigidity of reality but its infinite possibilities. Photography not simply as a tool to return a reality or to synthesize images of time, but rather as a stratification of different moments, replicating the incessant movement of life to unite the multiplication of time to space through the overlap of many shots.
Capturing a movement of the body when it ceases to exist, Delfino fixes his dream on cotton paper, as if to want to keep the ethereal shape of the figures that seem to have been drawn with crayons or colored pencils. The figures are mixed with the opaque background in uncertain and indefinite shades in order to show a fleeting reality – or rather: a dream destined to vanish at the very moment when the observer looks away.
La ricerca artistica di Delfino mira per cosi’ dire, a rendere la pluralità e la varietà del presente, sottolineata dalla scelta del corpo femminile nudo che serve anche ad evocare un’entità multiforme di natura creativa: una ricerca solo possibile in un luogo incerto, in una dimensione eterea, volubile e onirica.
The artist’s declaration of poetics
There is a moment in my day, sublime and terrifying at the same time.
It is the instant in which my universe remains suspended in a cloud, compressed, between the terrestrial and the ethereal, in a timeless time, in an unreal place. It is the moment of awakening, in which my dreamlike dimension passes from fluid experience to static fusion. At this moment everything that had been filmic, sequential and narrative is immobilized. It happens as if a film that unfolds crashes into an invisible wall, giving rise to a still-image formed by the fusion of a summa of frames. Dreamlike, unconscious image, appearing in a non-place place, out of space-time, but, paradoxically, both real and present.
It is here that I live my perception of the dream as intimately linked to the feeling of the memory and the drive of the desire to stop its experience in an image.
And here Rêves is born. The need to give a representation to an inner dimension, perceived as an abstract image and at the same time emotionally clear. La necessità di dare una rappresentazione ad una dimensione interiore, percepita come immagine astratta e allo stesso tempo emotivamente nitida. Through photography, my narrative language, and the human body, my expressive tool, Rêves recreates, through an elaborate technique developed for over a year, a real but non-existent dimension, an emotional sphere that envelops my being in that particular moment of the day.
To aspire to the realization of the perfect Rêve, to that which concentrates, in a single work, the maximum of emotion, dimension and greatness, corresponds to the impulse of this series, which projects in a dream dance, by definition, a series of images that seek the perfection born of desire. The desire that, by its definition (fascinating is the etymology of the word, “de-siderare” or feel the lack of stars) is unattainable and unbridgeable, becomes a driving force to the realization of a work in itself utopian. In the obsessive search for this sublime utopia I sometimes like to imagine myself, in my troubled sleep, as those Roman legionaries guarding the night in the camps, the so-called desiderantes, so-called because, Staring at the stars, they waited for the return of their scattered comrades, during the day, in battle. Desire that they knew in their hearts was impossible. So I, in my Rêves, await the return of an image, an emotion, dissolved in that instant in which the terrestrial and the ethereal become one. Alessio Delfino, march 2016