To avoid offending certain sensitivities, we warn that the site contains explicit content
To avoid offending certain sensitivities, we warn that the site contains explicit content
email: paolo@fotopaoloaldi.it
email: paolo@fotopaoloaldi.it
© 2021 by Paolo Aldi
© 2021 by Paolo Aldi
Fluctuations - Critical texts
Critical text by Luigi Serravalli on the occasion of the exhibition "Fluttuazioni" at the Galleria Le due spine in Rovereto. 1998
Photography is a universal medium. It is exploited, used, sodomized by endless uses, almost always cheap, vulgar, consolatory, post-romantic, inadequate and inefficient. Exploited, above all, the female nude, for lowly advertising purposes. It comes out of the eyes, in many cases it has something unacceptable, cadaverous, it appears hateful, to be avoided as much as possible. Or immediately sensual, vulgar (the body of Valeria Marini). Phenomena of inculture or low culture, overflowing television.
But, at the same time, in the latest edition of Kassel, the work of the photographer had almost always outpaced that of the brush and colors. A recent Biennale was won by two photographers from Düsseldorf and photography has its own autonomous space from Mapplethorpe to Oliviero Toscani, where this anthology of signs acquires meanings of quite another depth. In our region this is rare, but I can also cite the example of the Fasoli couple from Trento who, working on the computer, on initial photographs, garner international acclaim. After the American C. S. Peirce I would recall the development of ideas on photography (and therefore on cinema) by H. Bergson and then Gilles Deleuze who studies the relationships between photography and time, space, movement, etc. Today there are many types of cameras and printing papers as well as sensitive materials, so that the modern photographer (and Paolo Aldi is one) and photography are correctly and prominently placed among the visual arts. Even if this is not perceived by the masses who degrade photography to a low-profile mass consumption system. A system of signs capable of symbols, metaphors and allegories leads us (after De Saussure) to a new language, illustrated among others, by Umberto Eco himself. Language is the unique quality of man. I speak, therefore I am, more than the old I think, therefore I am. But one could also say: I photograph, I make cinema, therefore I am. That is, I become aware through mechanical means, of the existence of a world around me that belongs to me and is only mine: the search, the analysis of this world is the most authentic reason, exultation of our being here, leaving traces, with new media after the endless historiographies that the Egyptians taught us with their hieroglyphic system.
Aldi's nudes are his own invention, discovery, investigation, thus his alphabet. Communication. Language. Flowing. Life. Fluctuation. Rotation. Movement. (The photo that comes into contact, in comparison, emulation, competition, rivalry with cinema and therefore Video). In the heart of the postmodern.
Here Aldi deals with the female nude. The nude is the truth, man is born nude. The Greeks exalt in the nude the idea of beauty. The Middle Ages erase the nude as sinful. Only the Christs on the Cross and the Saint Sebastians are allowed (these often feminized). With the Renaissance the nude returns, in art, to an authentic protagonism. But someone puts pants on the damned in the Sistine Chapel. Today the nude leads us to various philosophical fields of rare relevance. The nude is the body, in symbiosis with the mind. The nude is my “other”. I constantly dialogue with my body, to which, however, I must recognize an autonomy that is very difficult to explore. The “Camera” helps me in this flow of frames. A flowing (Heraclitus), a fluctuating, in time and space.
Paolo Aldi offers us his personal interpretation, a part of his dialogue with the female body: images that are never the same but are difficult to fix in themselves. Bodies immersed in the amniotic fluid of space/time. Like the stars that travel through the eternities of eternities in which they are enclosed, the infinities around us. The nude thus also becomes the sacred. The photographer has disappeared, we are faced with the artist tout court. We hope that Paolo Aldi one day can also work with the movie camera and the means of the great image industry. These nudes, signifiers, float in Heideggerian being as in Husserlian phenomenology, that is, in a postmodern, now free from traditional systems. I would say, in Rovereto, in a Rellian postmodern. In this sense this deadly exhibition, among other things of high technical content, should constitute a shock or even a real starting point for a local revolution in the field of photography. As a personal friend of Marcello Gatti, I recognize in the directors of photography, very often, the greatest merit of the cinema I love most. Storaro, in Cannes, won the prize for best photography, but I think his was the most authentic prize, on a par with that of Angelopulos. Photography therefore “über alles.”
Finally, we must apologize because, until now, in our city, we had not foreseen the possibility of the emergence of a photographer artist, conscious of the differences of the future more than the similarities of the past.
Luigi Serravalli, Rovereto, May 1998.
Luigi Serravalli with Paolo Aldi
Le due spine Gallery