Roberta Bertozzi interno 38

Genesis of the wildwood
Notes on the photography of Luca Piovaccari
in ALCHEMY, n. 1, december 2006

abstract

Luca Piovaccari has a few exclusive posing subjects on which his objective indefatigably returns, as if it were under the effect of an enchantment, or a compulsion to investigation – and to passion. Suburban moors where dwell bulwarks of a post-industrial horizon, or cement blocks showing their grey and austere structure. Modularly-structured buildings on the outskirts are shown as placed in a perfectly squared position, and surrounded by the orthogonal projections of the landscape. The photographer’s eye is far too smart (and exquisitely polite) to make out of this matter a symbol of the umpteenth j’accuse addressed to the decay of civil society); the choice and cutting of a certain image both fall onto these buildings, as well as on the environment surrounding them. This does not occur because the photographer wants to wring the scream out of the places, or to capture their painful meaninglessness; he rather wants to obtain from them a motive for harmony, a redemption, a presence. What he is aiming at is a foundation of the exemplar (thus, something memorable), to be achieved in the less likely places, in the most anonymous, silent, concise areas – in order to re-establish and regain for them a new value. Luca Piovaccari is able to extract such value, without ceding to the flattery of any aesthetic provocation; he manages to provoke it discreetly, by shifting his portraits towards an upper balance, inside a grace that borders on the purity of ikebana; he mitigates the naked and the raw within each exhibition, by converting the evidence of photography and its unmediated self-imposing into a thread of allusions and cross-references. His art is after a constant balancing action and a compensation that uses carefully measured artifices, which are gauged for different stages of lightness; such cautiousness is almost in contrast with the occlusive bulky size of his subjects. Not only is the photographer’s levitas realised through the tricks of photographic syntax, but it is also made possible thanks to the appendices of the installations: in both cases, these are interventions that do not adulterating the initial image, nor do they corrupt its ultimate meaning; they create a distance from the image, thus revealing it.
Piovaccari knows well that this new value can only be created and achieved by inserting a temporal gap, i.e. by introducing an anachronism within present time; hence, the latter is transferred onto the uncertainty of the déjà-vu, inside a dense and enigmatic time interval. Only by disintegrating the organic heaviness of cement and by pulverising the rigid compactness of molecules, can one insinuate in the spectator’s mind the feeling that one will be dealing with the placid ghosts of a newly found age.
In order to take an impartial look at these mausoleums of modernisation, one can be excluded from them, one has to be lifted – shifted of a few temporal millimetres. One has to be dislocated – and has to dislocate their very reality to a point of definitive dissolution. All technical effects, especially those used in the dark room, always correspond to a practice of dilution, which is functional to the fullest manifestation of the image’s secret. The acetate mount, on which Piovaccari frequently takes the pictures, conveys the whole range of perceptions of an object photographed within an evanescent aura, at the punctual moment of its disappearance: blurring, weak impression, veil, approximate fixing – these artifices are able to transmit a sense of absolute contingency, of absolute precariousness. The dark room properly highlights the latency of the object, its padded and transparent quality, its distance or casting within a rarefied wake, a curbed mystery. These are qualities that are brought about by the precise and translucent consistency of films; the effects are prolonged even in the case of a shift from a black and white to a coloured picture – colours being always taken within a scale of chromatic monotony, hence within a range of resistance to the trite spectacle of image. Thus the levitas is obtained – the image, past (and passive), captures the observers, it makes them lighter, by freeing them from a burden, from the post-modern morgue. Observers are therefore set free from the spite and the intolerable inhumanity of the landscape. As if, by slowing down to a remote time, we were able to participate to something that, if it were confronted frontally, would become brutally invasive to our gaze and would put it on the wrong track. [...]