By Lia and Paolo Aldi “Sunny Flowers” is a series of works created together, four hands. The “Flowers of the Sun”, exhibited here, are an explosion of shapes and colors, an unusual way of seeing, telling, and interpreting flowers photographically. In this church of S. Martino, we are exhibiting photographs that do not look like photographs, and this is because they are not made with a camera; it is a photographic alchemy that uses the sun to capture the visual imprint of the flowers that were placed on photographic film and thus left their trace/image. The works on display are also the transposition of our reflections on the photographic medium and its technical history. In these works, we reinterpret the history of photographic techniques using, as in the nineteenth century, the ultraviolet radiation emitted by the sun, the photographic film of the twentieth century, and the computer science of our contemporary era, but skipping the camera to reach the deepest synthesis of the photographic process: light on the subject and something that preserves its image. To these creative and reflective operations, we add photographic printing interventions, often experimental and unusual, which help to create further visual suggestions for the free space of the observer’s imagination and interpretation. In these works there is no realism but imagination, vision, creativity, research, and technique. The entire creative process is carried out with great rigor on our part, even though we are aware that in these works the unexpected and surprise are always around the corner. And it is precisely these unforeseen events that we seize, we make them our own with open-mindedness and the pleasure of surprise, because these unexpected happenings are a challenge but also and above all new lifeblood for the operation. This artistic attitude allows the observer to find great quantities of colors, of light and dark, of nuances, of details within the overall work. We believe that careful observation can foster meditative moments, suggestions that lead elsewhere, even incursions into one’s own interiority. These possibilities of making these works your own, in this way, exhibited in the church of S. Martino, fit well with the environment that hosts them because here they find a place built and inhabited in the past to foster meditation, the search for interiority, the aspiration to the high and the sublime: a hermitage as well as a church. Nature and contemplation: the church of S. Martino seems made specifically to exhibit the “flowers of the sun”, just as the “Sunny Flowers” seem made specifically for this place in which to enter on tiptoe, to be enjoyed in its shadows and in the bright lights that penetrate it, changing from minute to minute. It is a place to be respected. Hence the choice to exhibit the works using only the natural light that enters the little church through the door and windows, without adding any artificial light. The visitor must take the necessary time for their sight to adjust to the dimness, more or less marked depending on the time of day or the presence of sun or clouds. A small effort that will be well rewarded by the enjoyment of the environment and the art in a communion that we hope will be prodigious.
