SIMONE SCHIESARI – EUROPEAN PHOTOGRAPHY 2017

PORTRAITS OF YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN 

Edited by Roberta Valtorta

 

In Portraits of Young Men and Young Women Simone Schiesari questions, and questions us, about the “reality” of the human face, about appearance, about the relativity of the idea of “representation.”

The artist took from art history books and online archives of major museums a series of youthful faces from paintings dating from the Renaissance to the 19th century (but still before the invention of photography). Isolated from their iconographic context, he subjected them to a subtle digital intervention to  eliminate the traces of physicality of the pictorial material, the cracks of the support and the screen of typographic printing: making them, therefore, similar to photographs, or better we would say, to technological images, and accomplishing a kind of anthropological type of sampling, as of subjects to be studied and archived, one after the other, perhaps indefinitely. We are thus faced with identities of dubious provenance, about whom we know nothing: who they are, whether they posed before a lens, when and whether they lived.

The operation of re-generation accomplished by Simone Schiesari expresses the difficulty of tracing the origin of the images that surround us in the contemporary world, of being able to read all the faces that have arisen from history and mass society, always subjected to an endless process of reproduction and multiplication. Each young person’s face appears in its particular uniqueness and individuality, wrapped in an enigmatic melancholy. But each face, today, is above all an image, a physical and at the same time virtual anthropological site. Re-production and technological transcription speak to us of the  unattainability of human physiognomy and the relativity and theuncertainty of representation, yesterday as well as today. – Roberta Valtorta

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corso Cairoli, 2
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May 6and 7 ‘ 10-23
from May 12 to July 9
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