/ Cover: Monsieur Merde (alias Denis Lavant) in Holy Motors, by Leos Carax
What in a work of art arouses in me a wonder so great as to reduce me to silence? What cannot be described in words, communicated, transmitted, except through the joy of the eyes? Not the simple emotion contained in the work. Not the objective beauty of the reality it portrays. Nor even the perfection of forms that programmatically abstract themselves from reality. The silence I speak of is a vibrant silence, the stillness of one’s own identity ceasing to pour itself onto the work in order to judge it, or even merely to try to explain it. It is a silence in which one does not recognize oneself, but through which one reclaims a forgotten level of the self. It is the silence before the discovery that within the work it is possible to express the objectivity of the world on a further plane of consciousness. This may mean intervening heavily on the subject, on its colors and proportions, in an attempt to give it a new form, never unrecognizable from the starting one, but rather free of the logical and emotional connections that cage the deep, hidden meaning of things.
I am not interested in photography’s inherent ability to show time stopped. I am interested instead in stressing its structural objectivity, to understand whether it is possible to portray the world while simultaneously losing every bond with it. I am interested in finding a way to deceive the observer and lead them, without their noticing, into the territory of the inconceivable, of lucid dreaming, freeing them from the anguishing omnipresence of reality as it is. I am interested in finding a way for this to happen without everything collapsing under the rubble of a mere linguistic trick or mathematical abstraction. Discovering which connections must be broken, which elements should no longer be considered, and which deeper meanings should instead be preserved, how best to express them, with which colors and which contrasts, has significantly occupied my research over the past year and a half.
The evident change of course that led from Toros de Lidia of 2009 to Studies 2012 is the inevitable result of these discoveries. From a certain point on, the idea of street photography as I had been accustomed to conceiving it shattered, and from there arose the need for a new path to pursue the search for a new technique, a method that would allow me to find the hidden soul of an image and wrest it from that objectivity which has so exasperated me over the years.
These are, in truth, the opening moves of the research. From these first works gathered under the name Studies 2012, an inquiry officially begins, with all its contradictions and its fears.
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