For years, innovation has been the fetish word emblazoned on every project and slogan, the first entry in cultural agendas, the promise of every electoral platform. An answer demanded even before the question is posed, a disguised dogma that has replaced the call for shared meaning, value, and direction.
I imagined Innovation as an allegorical figure: sacred but not divine, hostile because it is an expression of power. I depicted her in uniform, half officer and half priestess. She still bears the military face of her origin — since even the smallest domestic invention is born from technologies designed and tested for war — but she spreads with the unquestionable tone of faith. She holds no high rank, quite the opposite: the hierarchical pyramid beside her reminds us that she occupies the lowest rung, that of the good bureaucrat of infinite Progress, the true essence of the modern world.
Around her sways a chain, her principal attribute. It is not a chain that binds or imprisons: it is made of 0s and 1s, the bits of binary language, a symbol of extreme simplification. To innovate for innovation’s sake means precisely to surrender to a mutilated, unpoetic vision of the world, one that reduces present, past, and future to an endless series of combinations and repetitions, without nuance or complexity. Her small, half-closed eyes, as if focusing on something very distant, look toward a future that need not be clearly discerned, since as soon as it is realized it will already be surpassed. At her sides appear the two Martyrs: Meaning and Desire, sacrificed on the altar of infinite Progress, nailed to a cross topped with the symbol of the binary pair.
The red and green behind her — opposite colors, maximally contrasting — create around her a field of permanent tension: attraction and repulsion, promise and conflict. In the background, words in German evoke the perverse logic of Progress, of which Innovation is only the latest byproduct: “Everything that can be done must be done.”
The Avant-gardes have long since ended, and with them the parenthesis of art’s autonomy from its historic function of religious and political legitimation. If the artist’s work can no longer be detached from the increasingly convoluted mechanisms of a market-based society — except by condemning itself to oblivion — it can at least reveal how those mechanisms function, and offer spaces for genuine reflection and discussion. It can still resist, continuing to inhabit the poetic and philosophical space of complexity.
If you pause at any random moment of the day, in the street or at home, alone or among people, and say WAR, a dull explosion might extinguish the mind for a second, leaving you petrified. But a moment later, body and mind will already be fleeing, into the side alley or into the political analyses on TV, assailed by terror and by the foreboding of pain and misery. If you say WAR in English, perhaps instead a muffled sound might rise in the ears, a dry murmur accompanied by overlapping images from films and family anecdotes. Perhaps a slight tightening in the stomach would also arise, along with an amalgam of fears, memories, and disturbing smells, but not paralysis, and therefore not flight.
This disorder is, I believe, the ideal state in which to be touched at a deep level, and it is certainly the state I try to create in myself and in whoever observes my latest work, in this historical moment, poor in the most basic sensitivity, regressed and vulgar, in which one can no longer distinguish a genuine emotion from a simulated one, in which one demands to be provoked and “identifies” with the other to the point of their destruction.
If distance from the will to provoke, from fanatical Cancel-Culture-style polarization, and from the most fashionable progressive themes has been, from the outset, a hallmark of my work, the novelty in War lies in applying these same principles to a theme clearly suggested by current events.
The initial impulse is rooted in the conviction that society as a whole is today mutilated in its finer psychic functions. The habituation to the obscene sight of massacres and destruction irremediably compromises one’s relationship with others, with one’s own pain, and above all with the capacity to form an opinion and take a stance. An overwhelming sense of guilt and helplessness in the face of inhuman events increases, in many, a generic resentment and a desire to escape by retreating into small, concrete things, as if an excess of reality were paradoxically turning into abstraction. And yet, reality and the world must be cared for.
For these reasons, and with even greater conviction than in the past, I do not want to describe or narrate, but to synthesize and distill. I have carefully selected the feelings, impulses, and raw emotions to address in each piece, investigating the most intimate and minute among them, in the belief that the deeper one goes, the more explanatory connections are set aside, and the closer one comes to a psychic place shared by everyone, a matter that has always mattered greatly to me.
And the psyche in relation to the feeling of war is precisely the second field of inquiry in this work. If Hot War focuses on worldly, visible war, Cold War, in a mirrored way, shows fragments of the individual’s intimate universe, whose lacerations are imitations and models of external fractures. These are two worlds facing each other: the outer and inner landscape of the solitary, deformed individual confronting ruin, of which they are simultaneously perpetrator and victim.
In style, too, I have leaned toward a synthesis of forms. I have tried to assemble a minimalist visual alphabet, deliberately anti-photographic, made of bright primary colors, solid fields, and graphic patterns, leaving behind the high definition of photography, which nonetheless remains the base medium. All of this in an ongoing attempt to limit, as much as possible, the conceptualization of the images, favoring instead a more intuitive, unguarded observation. The project will consist of ten works arranged in a rectangular 1-4-1-4 scheme, and will not be a symbolic path but a concrete, ordered puzzle of fragments of reality and psyche violently torn from their integrity. If successful, it will encourage everyone to read themselves within the world not as a separate entity positioned according to the logics of wealth and power but, recovering an ancient way of seeing, as a life interconnected with others, whose “matter” separates it from the rest only to a negligible degree.
All of my work, and Ka more emphatically and with a more structured approach than in the past, draws its greatest inspiration from ancient cosmogonies, from their mysterious revelatory power and from their being at once memory and prediction.
The title itself is a precise reference to the book of the same name by Roberto Calasso, a work very difficult to define, which might perhaps be described as an unprecedented, disarming journey through fragments of Vedic mythology.
Myth, often handed down to new generations as a fascinating yet crude tale of primitive peoples, should instead be rediscovered and reread as history’s deepest and most vital reservoir. It is its cornerstone.
Our civilization, in its current state, is incapable of producing myth. To me, this is the painful symptom of a disorder, as well as the consequence of an inability to see oneself as part of an infinite flow; ultimately, it is proof of a detachment from one’s roots that empties any outlook on the future of meaning.
Recovering a mythical vision is the purpose of my path. Each individual work, far from presenting defined characters or narrating ancient stories, seeks instead to recall deep impulses, timeless states. To resist analysis as the sole tool for reading reality. To question existence’s deepest, and therefore irreducible, mysteries.
Song of Empty Hands is a series of 12 images made in March/April 2020 during the lockdown imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. It is a work different from previous ones, just as the state of mind in which it was made is different. The theme is contact — not only its absence, as one might logically assume, but above all the various nuances that remain of touching. Grazing, timidly brushing with the tip of a single finger, touching without recognizing, questioning the marks things leave upon us; hands folded, demented, childlike. And then the forced rest, the waiting equal to the striking of the hour, the dismay at feeling one’s own perceptions change within a short time, the insignificance of every unshared action. The absence of others’ skin; the skin of hands, they say, is like a trap. The joke that everyone carries their own trap with them. The nostalgia for grasping something without thought, and the mockery of the wind that instead paws at everything, entering joyfully through the window.
In mineralogy, pseudomorphism occurs when one mineral transforms into another while retaining its original chemical composition unchanged. In the same way, the works making up the Pseudomorphika project have the “composition of photography” without being photography; they possess its technology but not its language, and the human figures they portray exist, but differently from how they appear.
At the root of the research leading to these results are certain questions that, years ago, imposed themselves with urgency in my work as a photographer: to what extent can a phenomenon be described by photographing it? To what extent is analysis useful? Can one truly be objective? What is missing in an image identical to the portion of reality it depicts? Although artists such as Cartier-Bresson and Salgado had amply shown me the possibility of poetic photography even within the limited objectivity of the technological medium, I suddenly sensed the danger of the excessively analytical gaze on reality that photography was, and still is, helping to normalize. A gaze that endlessly multiplies a surface-level datum but ceases to probe deeply, that insists on the individual within society while neglecting the human being, severing all ties with any artistic or philosophical tradition. Considering instead that the archetypal questions about existence, the mystery of being alive and of dying, and the substantial ambiguity of every phenomenon remain vital, I decided to try to bend the photographic medium to these concerns. On a technical level, two operations therefore became necessary: expanding my skills to include digital manipulation and painting techniques; and codifying a language that would not risk being confused with illustration or the fantasy genre. This is not about imagining other realities while disregarding the practical problems of the world, which must be addressed in altogether different ways and contexts, but about recovering a conscious gaze on that confrontation with the multiform and the unknowable from which existence has always originated. A gaze that today seems entirely absorbed by the minute analysis of current events and that, in my view, lies at the root of the countless distortions of the society we have created.
At present, this research path is chiefly represented by two series of works: Rivoluzionario passo zero, completed in 2018 and exhibited several times, and Ka, an unpublished series begun in 2019 and still in progress. Pseudomorphika draws from these two distinct moments its key developments, above all in relation to the treatment of the body and the face, which are photographed and then reconstructed “pseudomorphically” according to increasingly structured rules, with the precise intent of giving form to figures possessing the fundamental traits of ambiguity, of uncertain and controlled verisimilitude, indispensable for expressing those original impulses of human action that constitute the thematic core of the entire body of work.
/ Cover: Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog
By Claudia Andreotta
Giusi Lorelli’s approach to art inevitably arises from a doubt: the undeniable attractive power of her works erupts with the inevitable question, “Painting? Photography?” Thus the “zero step” toward the vortex of the indeterminate is accomplished, in a cosmos that fuses baroque, violent suggestions, dense with emotional tensions, transfigured into a rarefied yet lucid poetry. This is not, however, a journey toward other worlds, but a total immersion in the primal agonistic condition of humankind: the confrontation with the multiform, terrifying “challenger” in the eternal struggle toward self-awareness. The highly controlled use of technical and linguistic means, free of emphasis or rhetoric, leads along a path toward the unknowable: not an aimless wandering, but a genuine route set in the exact direction of a faint glimmer, a “preview” of the true self beyond the darkness. A persistent inquiry into the archetypal questions inherent in humanity, which never finds an answer either in the Enlightenment illusion of sovereign rationality or in the numbing evasion of mystical surrender. The questions raised, also prompted by intimately personal experiences, are stripped of every individual element to be transposed into universality, into an undeferrable urgency to question oneself. Rivoluzionario passo zero, an emblematic title encapsulating the sense and meaning of the artist’s most recent works (2014-2018), faced with the collapse of certainties, chooses to struggle with the unknown, aware of wanting to live a destabilizing experience in search of the self, yet unable to foresee the shape of the danger to which she chooses to expose herself.
Giusi Lorelli portrays the suspended moment, the “zero step” preceding the start of the battle, making palpable the emotional vibration of a situation whose victorious outcome is not a given. The viewer, too, must pause, setting aside all prior knowledge: the very language of these works is in fact “revolutionary,” often carrying meanings opposite to classical iconography. And if the initial doubt resolves in favor of photography, an unresolved feeling remains at the interpretive level: the recovery of the personal dimension of existence is an unrepeatable act, occurring in a different way for every individual. The artist points to the only viable itinerary but cannot provide directions: certain the route, certain the destination, (un)certain the nature of the journey into the soul.
/ Cover: Poster for the solo exhibition La notte lucida, in collaboration with the Fondazione Garaventa, 2016
RIVOLUZIONARIO PASSO ZERO (Revolutionary zero step) is the name of the collection bringing together works produced between 2014 and 2018, marking the conclusion of a first phase of research. Reflecting in hindsight on the works and on the lived experience they distill, I believe the common thread linking them can be defined as a progressive abandonment of positions. Secure but dangerously fixed positions are left behind, work after work, in favor of the intuition of a fluid way of being within reality, welcoming its uncertainty, risk, and horror as living matter to be forged. With the role of current events or news reporting falling away as the central reference point of inquiry, what emerged instead were those timeless antecedents that lie at the bottom of everyone’s soul and that, settling and accumulating over time, release a clear and therefore deeply revolutionary gaze on things, far from the traps into which the angry agitator, the fanatic, and the simply deluded fall.
TWINS: THE MALE AND THE FEMALE Of the two twins portrayed in the work, only one exists in ordinary reality; the other is an intuition, the suspicion of a lost unity, perhaps a dream. Seeing them together, for once, is a discovery. The work focuses on the intimate, pulsing relationship between the buried and the emerged part of reality. Although the former is lost to sight, whether by accidental choice or perhaps by precise intent, their dialogue is alive and in some way holds the solution to the enigma of life.
ACCEPT THE GIFT The work speaks of the profound drama connected to the total acceptance of oneself. A female figure generously offers herself to the gaze, but an obstacle, the knife, draws the observer’s attention, who ends up watching themselves watching. Accepting the gift would instead entail the opposite, that is, making the immense effort of casting one’s gaze further ahead. It does not mean being indulgent with oneself. Rather, it means setting oneself in motion toward a radical transformation that brings the two extremes of the self to touch. Only in this sense is it possible to give oneself the real opportunity to be rich.
CROSSING THE GOBI In an old interview, Jodorowsky said of Castaneda’s tales: if it’s a deception, it’s a sacred deception. Indeed, a story that is not poetic is merely a chronicle that leaves out all that is incommunicable and therefore deepest and most essential. Sacred deception is the true protagonist of Crossing the Gobi, which draws on a passage from Gurdjieff’s book Meetings with Remarkable Men, in whose mask the impossible, the real, and the unrealistic meet to the point of coinciding, opening the way to the intuition of new, profound truths.
THE DUKE D’AUGE STEPS OUT OF HISTORY The Duke d’Auge is the protagonist of Raymond Queneau’s novel The Blue Flowers. Untamable and hyperactive, what enchants in him is the antihistorical quality of his continuous action, entirely disconnected from any modern idea of progress. His way of being is of a wisdom-bearing nature, one in which the past and history are not places for reaffirming the pride and identity of an individual or of an entire civilization, but for tracing, in the depths of memory, a truth about one’s being in the world.
CATALINA AMONG THE DAMNED Catalina is an imagined figure, half human and half divine. A being of transition. Freakish in appearance, her chest protected by a golden breastplate, she is separated from the ordinary world by wealth understood as a condition of being. Around her drags a humanity lost through laziness, complaint, corruption, and cowardice. The work is freely inspired by Felix Nussbaum’s painting The Damned.
SHAITAN KEEPS THE WELL COVERED In all Western esoteric traditions, as well as in shamanic cultures far from the Mediterranean, Shaitan — that is, Satan, the Challenger — is an inner human impulse, the “antithetical element,” a “force of negation” that opposes the risk inherent in evolution. A kind of guardian of the abyss of the personality, fierce keeper of the survival instinct. Shaitan must be tamed. Being incapable of doing so is what can be thought of as Evil.
EVE OF THE RETURN Faith without discernment (the pope behind the curtain) is the first enemy encountered by those who set out in search of the Origin. It is met over years of traveling certain distances in depth, but recognition occurs in a single, precise moment, coinciding with some exceptional event. If one then chooses to evade it, one is fortunate. This may cause bitterness, but also the need to turn back and bring the fruits (puzzle, padlock, and stitch) of that stretch of the path. The return is not a failure. One must know how to dwell in every place.
MARIA MANDINGA Freely inspired by the protagonist of García Márquez’s novel Of Love and Other Demons, Maria embodies qualities belonging to mythic heroes: strength, pride, purity of intent, courage, and impenetrability.
/ Cover: Blanca Guerra e Axel Jodorowski in Santa Sangre, by Alejandro Jodorowski
My work arises from the constant collision with the mystery of existence, from the need to contribute to untangling a gigantic knot, from the impulse Werner Herzog called the conquest of the useless, from the alchemists’ ambula ab intra.
The works belonging to it never settle on matters of current events, do not dissect facts; rather, they synthesize as much as possible, attempting to map a path that lies beneath the surface of events and constitutes their secret current. They are like atoms which, lined up and viewed from a certain distance, form a body. I have the reasonable suspicion that whatever appears clear under examination bears no resemblance to truth, but is instead a sum of measurements, useful in very specific circumstances and ultimately of little interest. For these reasons, the following series of images does not follow the criteria of the project, and each work arises from a different spark, tracing on its own a stretch of the same path.
The study, the experience, and the emotional storm that results from it are not the subject of the work but its backstory, which remains private and lived apart; what I strive to offer instead is the fruit of this phase, carefully stripped of anything pertaining to me alone and indeed pushed as far as possible from what sets me apart as an individual. Only in this way, I believe, can that fruit contain a seed precious to me and to my fellow human beings, for whom deep sharing — not superficial identification — is an indispensable aim.
/ Cover: Il ritratto e lo specchio, by Giusi Lorelli, Art&Art, n°62, feb-mar 2016
Article from the column La foto sulla schiena, Art&Art, no. 63, April-May 2016
A photographer can naturally be inclined toward only one of two possible attitudes: the fast one or the slow one. The fast attitude places the photographer before things as though facing fireworks. Reality reveals itself to him in a flash, in the form of an explosion, and a moment later a myriad of fragments strike him, waiting to be captured, like sparks coming from every direction. The hunt for sparks is spasmodic and feverish, often because the seconds are numbered, other times because his attention is stretched along infinite directions. In this spatio-temporal pressure lies the pleasure of the fast attitude, which is what unites the street photographer, the documentarian, the photojournalist, and finally the paparazzo. What differentiates them is the breadth of their field of interest. The slow photographer, by contrast, aims at the astronomical magnification of a single aspect. For him, the hunt begins long before the shutter is pressed. Days, months, even years spent hunting a detail that, once captured, must be reviewed under certain conditions, carefully sifted, and finally distilled into a single photograph. In this distillation lies the pleasure of the slow attitude, which belongs to the landscape photographer, whether of nature or of the city, as well as, to a certain extent, to the photographer of large-scale sets (in the style of LaChapelle, so to speak). What sets the latter apart from the others is that, for him, the detail is recreated on a set that becomes a laboratory governed by even stricter rules, in a place and time set apart.
It is wasted time to try to establish which of the two paths is more fascinating, and it should be added that incursions of fast photographers into slow territory, and vice versa, are frequent. Consider, for instance, the many enchanting landscapes of the extremely fast McCurry, or the early documentary narratives of the extremely slow, young Kubrick. But when applied to Salgado’s work, the very idea of incursion seems unfitting, because the verticality of his commitment as artist and witness to the world, the discipline and ardor with which he has trained himself both in speed and in slowness, make him a master of both approaches.
Sebastião Salgado, Brazilian, born in 1944, is a photographer with particularly refined senses — all six of them — which have built, along his path, a life worthy of a novel. Initially heading toward a career as an economist, with a degree from São Paulo and a job already underway in Europe, he encountered photography and swiftly, without hesitation, transformed himself into a photojournalist. The political-economic training he possessed naturally came to serve his photographic inquiry, and this shift in perspective is the first clue to a personality little inclined to settle along the routes suggested by aptitude tests. Another clue: in 1994, after roughly fifteen years of collaboration, he left the Magnum Agency. Working for Magnum meant, then far more than today, being in Olympus. Leaving it, however imperfect it may actually be, requires considerable clarity of intent. When in 2003, after a period of deep crisis, of “sickness of the soul” as he himself called it, he decided to devote himself to a project of an entirely different nature from photojournalism — the “visual ode to the beauty and fragility of the Earth” that would become Genesis — more than a few doubts arose among his collaborators. “What, after everything you’ve done, you’re turning to landscape?” someone must have said, wrinkling their nose. Indeed, the prejudice still lingers today that landscape photography is somewhat of a genre for everyone, with little room for innovation, not very demanding, and above all too slow for the temperament and career of a photojournalist.
But, as was to be expected from the work of a man who is not outside the mold but, more precisely, devoid of one altogether, Genesis offered itself to the world with the force of a revealed secret. It doesn’t take long to realize that Salgado’s landscapes stand elsewhere compared to those of any other author; the difference lies not only in technique, nor only in the monumental scale of the effort, but in both together, accompanied by a disposition of spirit that does not merely observe but, further still, embraces, welcomes, and loves to the point of merging with everything before it. What Genesis’s images arouse is a feeling that precedes the coding of emotions, something more ancient than the idea of perfection or of panic. It is the silence of a mind in contemplation. Certainly an unprepared observer, faced with the image of a penguin diving from an iceberg into the ocean, might not resist the impulse to exclaim “how poetic!”, “how tender that penguin is!” — just as happens when admiring other, different but equally breathtaking photographs. But in this case, immediately afterward, they would be forced to recognize the utter inadequacy of their own emotion before the power of a new way of seeing. The absence of preconception and prejudice is total, just as there is no trace of any cultural coding regarding beauty. In the portraits, this absence of reference becomes downright rough and illegible to the Western observer. Those faces, through which feelings we have never given a name to shine through, often make identification impossible and leave one feeling uncomfortable, inadequate, as though seated on a scorching chair.
Genesis is testimony to a way of dwelling on Earth that is as new as it is ancient, of looking at it without falling into the rusty man-nature dialectic that, depending on the moods of the times, sees one or the other triumph. In Salgado, everything simply is. In stillness. Even the man, the woman, the child. A timeless stillness that recalls, if possible, that of a bow drawn taut the instant before the arrow is loosed, and certainly not that of cloth folded away in a drawer.
Every artist’s work is the result of their journey into certain deep and marshy places of existence, but some men manage to descend so far into pain that when, in rebound, they find themselves visiting the high places, nothing stands in the way of their joy.
From the series Suggestioni andaluse in controtempo
The Andalusian sun in the summer season presses down upon the earth, slows and burdens every movement, dazzles and forces the eyes shut in anticipation of the night, so much so that at various moments it reminded me of Camus’s words on Algiers in The Stranger:
“For two hours now the day had not moved forward, two hours during which it had dropped anchor in an ocean of molten metal.”
This very violent quality of light and heat is the central theme of Suggestioni andaluse in controtempo (Andalusian Impressions Off-Beat), in which the excess of the day’s attributes is shown through night, and the oppressive heat through the need for cold. The deep shadows of buildings and churches, the thick walls concealing bodies in search of a saving, cool half-light, the windows like giant wounds drawing everything into an unreal whiteness, and the pools of earth bleached or scorched by an eternal noon, are evidence of the invincible quality of a land whose grace and torment lie in its excess of light, and of a continuous counterbeat of forces that conceal precisely where they most display themselves, and vice versa.
