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 Mario Cossali on the occasion of the exhibition "Fluttuazioni" at the Uma Gallery in New York. 1999
Although photography occupies a far from secondary place in the panorama of the artistic avant-gardes of the "short" century now drawing to a close, both from the point of view of the historical protagonists and their achievements and from the point of view of theoretical elaboration, it is mostly relegated, at best, to its own field, a sort of technical and artisanal reserve that keeps it well away from artistic research.
Sometimes, instead, almost as a sort of critical counterpoint, the opposite operation is carried out, that is, to identify photography as such with a work of creativity and invention, ignoring the tools, materials, and languages specific to photography and "sanctifying" the image with a title, that is, with a conceptualist artifice that should extract it from its "greyness" and "mediocrity."
In both cases, photography is not considered for its characteristic potential, but only for ancillary performances that vary from time to time.
Paolo Aldi is aware of all these aesthetic-interpretative knots, he meticulously seeks forms, the form, decontextualizes the image without taking refuge in the easy shortcuts of the abstract.
There is an extraordinary passage by Walter Benjamin in the essay "A Short History of Photography" (published in 1931 in the Berlin magazine "Die literarische Welt") that can serve as an introduction to the commentary on Paolo Aldi's "fluttuazioni," especially to understand its symbolic complexity.
"The nature that speaks to the camera is a different nature from the one that speaks to the eye; different especially because, in place of a space consciously elaborated by man, there is a space unconsciously elaborated. If it is quite usual for a man to realize, for example, the gait of people, even if only in general, he certainly knows nothing of their bearing in the fraction of a second in which the step is extended. Photography, with its means, shows him this. Only through photography does he discover this optical unconscious, as, through psychoanalysis, the instinctive unconscious."
Paolo Aldi's nudes float, sway between the resistance and transparency of the body, bringing to light at the point of maximum technical artificiality the highest point of inner truth. The body consists of matter, has measurements, marks boundaries, and at the same time lives in movement, in relationship, escapes the fixity typical of matter, is in fact largely made of water, grows and is depleted.
The body often takes on the strangest and most unthinkable dimensions, unconsciously following the paths of dreams, music, suffering, falling in love. The knowledge of the body is not irrational, but includes what goes beyond the mere move of reason. The body is made and undone and in any case marks an entire universe of traces and clues, which become history and memory, vision and allusion.
Paolo Aldi's nudes represent an existential and thus cognitive fluctuation: in the fluctuation they want to bring to light the forms of the body, forms that welcome, forms that reject, spots in the dark, lanterns in the night, consoling refuge or else a foreign and hostile place.
Paolo Aldi has technically accentuated this process of fluctuation (of the images in themselves but also for themselves) by using infrared film. The photograph wants to demonstrate in the image the visual, emotional, intellectual wavering in which we are immersed and which we cannot express with words and adequate concepts.
Particular techniques aim to go beyond, as much as possible, the image captured by the lens, even if the latter was already fantastically charged.
Making visible the mystery that is hidden both in the body and in the eye that looks: Paolo Aldi is faithful to this cognitive commitment, steering clear of any calligraphic and decorative siren and relying on creative stimulus with ever-renewed naivety, with ever-renewed "expectation of the compositional miracle."
Mario Cossali
Galleria Le due spine -Rovereto