Giuseppe Mastromatteo
FORMA Centro Internazionale di Fotografia Piazza Tito Lucrezio Caro, 1 I-20136 Milano Italie
Caroussel du Louvre 99, rue de Rivoli 75001 Paris France
Paris Photo 52/54 quai de Dion Bouton 92800 Puteaux France
Every work is commented by a text especially written by each artist on the occasion of Paris Photo 2009
(with the exception of Mario Giacomelli); the text – when possible handwritten – will be given together with the actual work to the buyer.
Each photograph is the result of a vision. The author has imagined it, maybe dreamt of it, and then has retraced it in the reality to reproduce it with photography. Or perhaps, the author has staged it, following an impulse, a memory, a dream.
The images in this selection are examples of many possible “photographic dreams”, the results of projects created by different authors, young or not, famous and well established or moving their first steps in the international art scene.
To each of them we have asked to choose and comment their preferred visions, the dreams (or nightmares) imagined and then made real through their photographs. Through their eyes, dreams and visions become the materialization of obsessions to escape, fears to exorcise, desires and expectations to maketrue. Dreams and visions specifically created for the photographic paper.
The selection features 26 images, each accompanied by a brief text by the artist who tells the dream or the vision from which that image derives, the desire or the obsession that made it real and alive.
Dreaming spaces, to live in, to look at and walk through, are the scenes created by Maurizio Galimberti, Irene Kung and Mimmo Jodice. Jodice’s deep black and out of focus make the spaces he captures indefinite, as if they emerged from an oneiric dimension. Galimberti’s warm contrasts create an unreal dimension, unexistant, an emotional world, away from reality. Kung creates a new dreaming vision of famous architectural monuments.
Dreaming creatures appear in front of William Klein’s camera (through a vision that has become an archetype of female beauty) and materialize in the digital elaboration of young Giuseppe Mastromatteo.
Sebastião Salgado retraces and finds images of an uncontaminated nature, through cathedrals of ice, or the true bond between man and earth.
The primigenial relationship is searched for and staged also by Albert Watson, suspended between the lucid obsession of a terrible, blind instinct and the fear of a tormented, almost lost childhood.
The past can come back as a remote dream from which it is difficult to get away, as in Gianni Berengo Gardin’s works.
Due to his experimenting into the informal, Nino Migliori evokes past, memories, all that seems to escape reality but resurfaces always new, elaborated by memory.
One can also wish to dream and get rid of fears through the retrieving practice of dreaming and dream-telling. It is the language matter of Simona Ghizzoni’s new works, or the absolute, complete black, the blinding white of Piergiorgio Branzi.
A photographer can push even further, representing nothing but the feeling of a colour and the emotion of a sign. The colourful creation of ancient memories of Bill Armstrong, deriving from Reinassance sculptures, as well as the abstract white and black of Mario Giacomelli (the abstract photographs by Giacomelli are shown for the first time) are open compositions, ready to take in the representations of dreamt dreams. Of the visitors, this time.