Opening Sunday, May 22, 2011 at 6pm, at the Valente Gallery of Finale Ligure (SV) the exhibition dedicated to the new photographic series of Alessio Delfino, Tarots.In it, Delfino deals with a personal interpretation of the Major Arcana of the Marseillaise Tarot deck, through the language of the photographic art nude. The Tarot deck, over the centuries used for esoteric purposes and for the reading of the destiny of men, has probably found its highest expression in the version commissioned in the first half of the fifteenth century by Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan.
The series is a work in progress that has so far given birth to Arcana such as La Papesse, The Empress, The Amoureux, La Justice, La Mort, Le Diable, La Maison de Dieu, L’Etoile, La Lune, Le Soleil. All the cards are presented in giant dimensions: the height is not an exercise in style but is a declaration of subjection of the human being to destiny and the masculine to the feminine. This is how the young Ligurian artist understands the question of the eternal feminine, who in the new series outlines a timeless feminine universe and immersed in a world of symbols: that of the divinatory charts used as predictors in Europe from the use that the Spanish Gypsies learned from the Arabs during their occupation of the Iberian Peninsula. “In a post-rationalist era – writes the critic and curator of the exhibition Nicola Davide Angerame – where the society of entertainment has taken the place of faith, this work by Alessio Delfino reminds us that the Tarot cards are inextricably linked to hermeticism, to the Cabal and esotericism in general and have their roots in the origins of our culture, which are mythological and symbolic, even before rational and scientific”. Delfino interprets the Tarot to claim that the life and destiny of men are subject to the power of the symbolic.
His photographic art has different levels of reading: it can be aesthetically satisfying, in the pellicular sense of the artistic nude or it can bring the discourse to the depths of history, where the mythical and philosophical origins of the Tarot are lost, often intended esoterically as pages of an interrupted and fragmentary wisdom book, whose messages reach us by images and over the centuries have aroused an intense interpretation that is inexhaustible. “Stylistically – continues Angerame – Delfino’s photography dialogues with some great authors who have changed the history of the photographic nude of the last three decades: with Helmut Newton shares the taste of portraying a woman of a new type, martial and equipped with a post-feminist beauty, more aware and aggressive, decisionist, managerial, even sadistic. David Lachapelle takes a certain taste for the game, for the wink (just mentioned) and for a baroque that, if in lachapelle knows the known excesses ultrapop and mannerist, in Delfino remains subdued not to break the balance imposed by the seraphic afflato of the cards of destiny. By Erwin Olaf Deflino admires the vintage and elegant, evocative and mysterious atmospheres, which remove the Major Arcana from the temporality of a realism that is neutralized, as well as eroticism, thanks to the desaturation of color and the softness of the lights.
As Roland Barthes points out in his book capital: for those who look at the photographs of Delfino “it is as if“he had to “read in the Photograph the myths of the Photographer, fraternizing with them, without believing too much“. Delfino’s photography produces exactly such an effect of non-violent fascination, of playful seduction, of serious hilarity giving the image the possibility of being read on several levels, stratifying the sense and announcing a photograph capable of combining glamour and suspense. As if beauty were only the mask of a deeper truth. “The aspect of Tarot divination – says Delfino – actually interests me less than the esoteric and cultural aspect. I am interested in the part of the Tarots related to knowledge and to some eternal questions such as: who we are, where we come from, where we go. Tarot cards offer a kind of knowledge that is the object of my study. The teaching that man can assume from the Tarot is actually within the reach of everyone, but not everyone deepens. Those who do so discover that they have a book available that speaks through images and that allows access to a deeper and philosophical knowledge. I believe that the reflection triggered by the Arcanes can allow everyone to rise to a higher level. It is not mysticism, but reflection, even rational if you want. I also find it interesting that the Tarot are linked in various ways to all ancient Indo-European esotericism, including Kabbalah, which is an ancient teaching that starts from the Hebrew alphabet”.