48 photographs by Guido Guidi and a short story by Vitaliano Trevisan. The show is the outcome of a dialogue between the photographer and the writer, who have explored the relationship between the apparent "superficiality" of our everyday landscape and the acts of appropriation made possible by our visual and verbal memory.
Jarach Gallery is glad to celebrate the beginning of its activity in the field of
contemporary photography with an exhibition of unpublished works by Guido Guidi
accompanied by a short story by Vitaliano Trevisan.
The show is the outcome of a dialogue between the photographer and the writer, who
have explored the relationship between the apparent "superficiality" of our everyday
landscape and the acts of appropriation made possible by our visual and verbal
memory.
The series of 48 photographs by Guidi (made in various locations since 1997) is a
reprise of a theme that the photographer investigated at the beginning of his career
in the 1970s: the domestic space as a realm of light and shadow, the home as the
camera obscura of our existence. Guidi's new "voyage around my room" brings him
outside, and in fact has the effect to interiorize the surfaces of the landscape by
way of a meditation that is both geographical, biographical, and metaphorical.
Guidi's work presents the world itself as inherently photographic: an accumulation
of materials which are sensitive to action of the light and record the passage of
time. His photographs show the many ways in which a ray of light can encounter a
wall or the skin of a person; they interrogate the palimpsest of signs left on a
pole or in a schoolroom; they evoke the presence of the body in a prison cell. In
such common places Guidi reenacts an old tradition of seeing as "clarification":
from the transparency of Mies van der Rohe evoked in a photograph of the IIT in
Chicago to the sharp lights of Walker Evans; from the "primitives" of the early
Italian 15th century to the paintings of Giorgio Morandi.
The short story that Vitaliano Trevisan wrote as a response to Guidi's photographs
animates the scene with a character who at the same time observes and recalls, and
who acts on what he sees and recalls. An interesting aspect of this experiment
between photography and literature lies in the possibility to use words and memories
to reactivate our visual field. Trevisan shows how Guidi's (and perhaps all)
photographs are made to be inhabited and looked at again and again. Vol. I is about
photographs which are at the same time windows and mirrors, sensitive surfaces which
can only be enlivened by our personal projections.
Opening: September, 12nd, 2006
Jarach Gallery
piazza San Marco - Venezia
Hours: daily 3 p.m. - 8 p.m. and by appointment