Tarots by Alessio Delfino. Notes for an initiatory photography
There is synchronicity between our state of mind and the figure of the Tarot that appears and, beyond words, puts us in a total listening that touches the body, passes through the belly, the heart, the head becoming then thought and action.
Carl Gustav Jung
In his recent book dedicated to the Tarot Alejandro Jodorowsky condenses 40 years of studies on the Marseille Tarot, revised and modified by himself, which led him to found his own school of public reading of cards thanks to which he plans a “social therapy”. The symbolism, the initiatory language, the synchronicity, the symbolic-psychological interpretation and the practical work that takes place in his crowded seminaries spread to psychologist disciples from all over the world. It is a form of modern exoterism that borders on psociterapia and psychogenealogy. Although the origin of these cards sinks with the myth in the mists of time, they unquestionably represent an important reservoir of initiatory meanings because linked to the great questions that have always haunted man: who am I, where I come from, What’s the point of my existence?
One version traces the origin of the Tarot to ancient Egypt of the God Thot, creator of writing (according to ancient Greek sources) and of every science, including magic. Some sources speak of the Tarot as a book, which held a hermetic knowledge and which has been lost. The cards are the traces and like all traces or fragments, stimulate and need a continuous proliferation of interpretations that makes them immortal and always contemporary with respect to the historical eras that alternate. It is therefore not important to know the truth of the Tarot, more important is to approach them with the correct mental predisposition. A predisposition that becomes photography in the case of Alessio Delfino who decides to interpret in a personal way the 22 Major Arcana, starting himself a journey of reading and discovery of the deep meaning of the Tarot. As a mirror they are also able to reflect in part the personality of their interpreter. But it is the power of the symbol, the strength of the archetype, the suggestions of the images and the symbolism of the colors, which make the Tarot an excellent test for those who want to try their hand at the richness of the images. The Mantenga Tarot cards are famous, but even today artists and graphic artists, cartoonists and photographers appeal to archetypal figures, which already Jung appreciated as many viaticums of an inner search,
For Jung, as for Jodorowsky, the Tarot cards appear as hermetic figures but can become a shared language thanks to their symbolic and iconic nature. This aspect fascinates the photography of Delfino, who chooses to stage, in a literal sense, his Tarots enhancing the monumental aspect. Etymologically, the monument represents a “warning”, an exhortation, an invitation to understand and memorize a message that is concretized in a statue, in a sculpture that in the public space of the square is located at its natural seat. In this case it is photography that wants to achieve the strength of the monument, the ability to urge to a research that the artist together with the women he photographs is doing, thanks to a relational process whereby it is the model who chooses the character of the card she wants to play. A detail not irrelevant to obtain a final result that has the taste of a timeless image, statuesque but also vital, mysterious yet vivid. The Major Arcana of the Marseillaise Tarot deck is perhaps the highest expression achieved in the art of Tarot depiction. This interpretation was commissioned in the first half of the 15th century by Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan. The gigantic print of the photo, thanks also to the very high quality with which the details are taken, make you find yourself in front of a “paper” that has the taste of a tableau vivant. Stature is not an exercise in style for Delfino but represents a declaration of subjection of the human being to destiny and the masculine to the feminine. The question of the eternal female emerges in the series and outlines a female universe out of time and immersed in a world of symbols, that of cards that were used as divinatories in Europe only from the use that the Spanish Gypsies learned from the Arabs during their occupation of the Iberian Peninsula. The exaltation of the fluid beauty and the artistic nude does not prevent Delfino from reaching conceptual results, the final result of which is a research around the relationship that we modern with the “myth” of knowledge. In a post-rationalist era like the one in which we find ourselves (in which the economy depends more and more on the psychology of the masses as well as the equally irrational boundless greed of a few powerful and where the society of entertainment has taken on paroxysmal tones) this work of Alessio Delfino reminds us that the Tarot are inextricably linked to Hermeticism, Kabbalah and esotericism in general and have their roots in the origins of our culture, which are mythological and symbolic, even before rational and scientific.
Tarot cards are one of the most popular symbols, also thanks to the fact that each major Arcane is a complete image, of this esoteric relationship with the understanding of the authentic and the origin. Also in the Tarots, Delfino develops his own relational photography, fed by the relationship between the artist and the muse, which sees women presenting themselves to the photographer with the clear intention of interpreting the paper of their choice. Delfino speaks, knows, listens to the deep aspirations of his women, then works on it, creating for them the environment that best suits. The Empress is the engine of this process, the first card made. Just as the world is “representation”, the life and destiny of men is also subject to the power of the symbolic. Photography is therefore called, beyond any objective reference, to recreate the atmosphere
Beyond an operational and content originality, Delfino’s theoretical and stylistic reference points can trace us in “models” such as Erwin Olaf or Helmut Newton, passing through David lachapelle. If the first Delfino admires vintage and elegant, evocative and mysterious atmospheres, the second appreciates the use of models with a post-feminist beauty, more aware and aggressive, decisionist, managerial, even sadistic. Of the last mentioned master Delfino instead takes a certain taste for the game, for the winking (in him just mentioned) and for a baroque taste that, if in lachapelle knows the well-known ultrapop excesses and mannerists, in Delfino remains subdued not to break the balance imposed by the seraphic afflato of the cards of destiny. Their “tightness”, offered also by the compositional rigor, bursts from a post-modern symbiosis in which photography exploits every possibility to create a space in which the senses and symbols can hover with dramatic lightness, without losing the depth of an original feeling and without plunging into the obsolete splendors of rhetoric. As Roland Barthes points out in his capital book, for the viewer it is as if the public had to “read in photography 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. Delfino creates his sets in a maniacal way, studying all the details and making up the characters for hours in order to make them statuary, softening the eroticism of the scene and enhancing the personality of the protagonist of the card. The vintage taste allows him to give an idea of “timeless” image, moved into a past that can be remote but also recent or eternally present. This “timeless” rigour is reflected in the character’s porcelain skin, which is thus covered with a mask that, like that of ancient Greek theatre, allows access to the figure’s symbolism.
The use of photoshop in post production is banned. Use only the print preparation functions, which are also done analog. Photoretouching would be the negation of a work that loves detail, the minute imperfection of the skin, the hidden wrinkle that gives real substance to the image. A fold, a small ravine or depression, made almost imperceptible under the makeup, become stories for those who can nourish a certain fetishism of detail. The final photograph is only the last step of a long journey of the imagination. Improvisation and photo-retouching are two extraneous elements to the work of Delfino, who likes to approach the ideal image step by step. “I stop when the energy comes out, which I ask the image because I have the composition in mind before shooting. While shooting I see the work in progression, the images come out on the screen and I screen them with a quick look. I wait for the image that has magic, after which the others do not exist”.
Nicola Davide Angerame
Tarots
With Tarots, Alessio Delfino’s reflection on the ancestral symbolism linked to the sacred feminine, which permeates the work carried out in recent years, takes on an additional value. The cosmogonic discourse behind the search for the origins of the mother goddess, declined in its different qualities to compose a real pantheon of female deities, now reveals its deep sense, the link with a third element which had not been fully interpreted. In the compositional vision of each of the six major arcana of the tarot, inspired by the Marseille tradition, that Delfino has so far built, without haste, in this open artistic project, which makes the passage of time a constitutive element of the very meaning of its becoming, the feminine, the origin of life and the highest expression of the very meaning of earthly existence, or the path of access to the successive phases of knowledge, intertwine in an irreversible chemistry, just like in an alchemical formula.
The journey that symbolically undertakes the Bagatto, card number zero, through the path that will take him from initiation, through a phase of purification and one of enlightenment, to the final reintegration, to reach at the end a new cognitive and spiritual status, that will make him free: crazy in the eyes of most, can represent the journey that the artist himself makes through his own path of awareness. And that returns a work that seems to want to contain everything, almost as for Jorge Borges in his Aleph. An Opera Omnia, an Aleph precisely, which contains in itself the symbolism of the beginning and the end, which alternate and chase each other; with a strong reference to the Comedy of that Dante Alighieri who by chance or perhaps not begins to write his Opera Omnia right in the same “Middle of the path of our life”, in which the Savonese artist is to undertake his journey through Tarots. But there is an element that, among all, disambiguates the initial feeling of having a perfect work in front, which almost prevents any other interpretation than that already meticulously composed by its wise director. In the flawless aesthetics of each of Delfino’s photographs, in fact, the true level of esoteric access, hidden to most, can consist only in tracing a space of interpolation, a white space composed within a full and visitable aesthetic scheme, according to strict mystery discipline, only after having full access to the previous hermeneutic level. On this level, the viewer who has won an adequate entrance key can finally attach a meaning to the interweaving of meanings delivered by Alessio Delfino. Only in this way can the artist try to conquer a new level of knowledge and, like the mad, the tarot number zero, symbol of rebirth at the end of the deck, start over.
Diletta Benedetto
Myth, feminine beauty, formal perfection.
Photography abdicates its original nature as a means of reproduction of reality, to build iconic architectures in which they inhabit the myth and formal perfection and in which you breathe an atmosphere magically suspended, crystallized in a timeless dimension with a decadent aftertaste. Refined photographer, Alessio Delfino composes, scrupulously and in accordance with the dictates of the sources, the settings in which the subjects are portrayed, referring to other places, to other dimensions, inviting us to cross the threshold of mystery and the supernatural. The Tarots series, dedicated to the twenty-two major arcana of the Marseille Tarot, is represented here in the first six shots depicting the Moon, the Empress, the Devil, the Sun, the Star and Death, elegant and complex allegorical representations in which the classical iconography is wisely sublimated both by the aesthetic conception and by the neo-baroque style of the artist.
The thematic choice is a spontaneous emanation of the esoteric interests of Delfino who, with the representation of the tarot deck as an initiatory path towards knowledge and in which the female figure plays a strategic symbolic role, reveals what are the guidelines of his personal research: the sacredness of the eternal feminine and the centrality of women in a conception of the world understood as “great representation” and “of life as a path of subjection, more or less voluntary and conscious, to the power of the symbolic”.
Anna Saba Didonato