Alessandro Albert Roger Ballen Antonio Biasiucci Enrico Bossan Silvia Camporesi Daniele Cascone Marina Cavazza Nicolò Cecchella Stefano Cerio Charles Fréger Gilbert Garcin
Paolo Gioli Alessandro Imbriaco Duane Michals Helmut Newton Francesco Ricci Malick Sidibé Paolo Ventura Paolo Verzone Joel-Peter Witkin
Posed
Alessandro Albert Roger Ballen Antonio Biasiucci Enrico Bossan Silvia Camporesi Daniele Cascone Marina Cavazza Nicolò Cecchella Stefano Cerio Charles Fréger Gilbert Garcin Paolo Gioli Alessandro Imbriaco Duane Michals Helmut Newton Francesco Ricci Malick Sidibé Paolo Ventura Paolo Verzone Joel-Peter Witkin
A posed image is by definition a built up image, being still or caught in the illusion of the motion. Posing, then, is a condition of “real fiction”. Reflecting on this fundamental theme of photography, from its origin to the actual time, the exposition presents the works by twenty authors, differing by generation, fame, professional and artistic path.
As in a big theatre show, as in the “great theatre of the world”, each one takes his own posture, truly false, falsely true, and acts in subsequent scene changes. From the painted backdrops, as in the nineteenth century, by Malick Sidibé and Paolo Ventura to the urban suburbs by Francesco Ricci and to the cold and formal military academies by Paolo Verzone, from the intimate atmosphere of the self-portraits by Marina Cavazza or Silvia Camporesi, to the surrealistic world of Duane Michals, ending up in the wild nature where from the ground rise the archaic masques caught by Charles Fréger. End of the first part.
When the curtain rises again, on the scene there they come, to mislead or to comfort us, the still life photos and the portraits by Antonio Biasiucci, Paolo Gioli and Nicolò Cecchella. Besides them, the marble bodies by Helmut Newton, as living statues, and changing the scale, the hand-cutted paper figures of Gilbert Garcin, the mannequins in colonial uniform shown from the back by Alessandro Imbriaco, a fiberglass american soldier surprised by Stefano Cerio under the lights of Gardaland and at last the canned puppets of Alessandro Albert, ready to be put on the shelves.
Last part of the show: with the echoes of the skull nuclear magnetic resonance signed by Enrico Bossan – in pose to challenge the disease – appear the horrific bodies by Roger Ballen e Joel-Peter Witkin – necrophilia as a posing thought – and the faceless figures, burden by the weight of history, art and memory by Daniele Cascone. The curtain goes down and the last
on the stage is Oscar Wilde, reminding us that “spontaneity is a posture extremely difficult to be kept”.
