This exhibition is small and partial but urgent and timely.
This exhibition is familiar and friendly.
This exhibition is not an exhibition.
It's a postcard sent even before departure.
As we are about to send our works to Japan, where they will remain for two or three years for group exhibitions, we thought it would be a pleasure to share and greet them with friends, relatives and the curious. We launched the idea instinctively to our friend Giandomenico Tono, and immediately he accepted it, thus establishing the record of the Instant exhibit: the fastest show in the West.
The request from the Far East however, was to somehow bring there an idea of Italy. We agreed to interpret this pretext without claiming to represent anything other than our personal way of operating and looking at what is happening around us.
So we both went back in time:
Maria Letizia Gabriele presents, adapting the ancient salted paper technique, a series of landscape shots printed by herself with sunlight and patiently colored by hand,
Richard Khoury has re-edited, printed and enlarged photos taken on film at the end of the last millennium, at Vincenzo Scamozzi's Rocca Pisana.
Images that originate from the past, reworked today through analogue and digital operations and techniques, will be our testimonies in the eyes of those who see them.
Libreria Pangea
Via San Martino e Solferino 106
35122 Padova
Tel. 0498764022
www.libreriapangea.com
These works are an interpretation of the Italian natural landscape, of places full of meaning but also fragile, revisited through salted paper, an ancient photographic technique which, using sunlight, reshapes natural elements.
The images were partly handcolored in pencil, so that monochromaticity and color coexist, bringing about a change in forms, also symbolically modifying the places, almost evoking an artificial and tormented landscape.
In the year 1577 the young Vincenzo Scamozzi, pupil of the Renaissance Master architect Andrea Palladio, had finished to build his first commissioned Villa, the so called Rocca Pisana in Lonigo, near Venice, North Italy.
This masterpiece has set a new deep relationship between nature and the human creation, studied by generations of architects all over the world. After more than 4 centuries I have been so lucky to stay there for several times, barely enough to catch the spirit of the place.
These photos have been taken on film with medium and large format cameras.