Suspended

Sicily: a near-present just passed.

What do I photograph and why? What attracts me most? For sure I’m engaged in “thought experiments” producing landscapes. I try to extrapolate through the lens what is in my brain and the results are realizations of my mental form “out there”. I feel the need to link inner and outer reality, mind and matter, by the means of a mindscape. For sure this inner motion can be fulfilled thanks to the places I know most, where I was born, shooting over the last years, my Suspended project. Suspended is, as a result, still a documentary project, even I feel it as the result of real personal need. A photographic sequence exploring what is far from Mediterranean stereotypes and "tòpoi". No winking postcards testifying a collective image of Lands full of art and nature. No iconic visions of black dressed mamas, godfathers and religious fests. Visual sketches, on my Landscapes, where “The City is as old as Time and continuous with it”(1), where every place has been (or is going to be) colonized by man made artefacts. Suspended, between past and future, sky and earth, as suspended are buildings and structures that seam to grow up spontaneously from a common soil. In turning my mindscapes into reality, in choosing my subjects, I’ve created, without a deliberate decision, a time jumping effect, between unfinished and ruins, incomplete buildings and to-be projects with a various outcomes: spaces re-conquered, wounds in the present, delirious projections into the future.
(1) In The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978.

In Suspended there is a splendid and tragic feeling of emptiness, if those two could be mentioned in the same breath, and surreal as well. I like the scale shifts you are seeing with the cars, people, the houses, and the sun-blasted and burnt color of the landscapes and buildings. It shows me a kind of painful beauty in desolation, taking us beyond any hope of recovery. This is good work. Congratulations for staying so true — Joel Meyerowitz, April 2nd 2019

Year: 2006-Ongoing | Archival Pigment Prints | Optionally mounted on Dibond or Diasec | More Information | Artist Statement