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
The lake - The poetics
The works are photographs transferred onto wooden panels and then worked in encaustic with natural waxes and resins. The images are only apparently monochromatic and with an antique flavor, but if looked at closely they are indisputably contemporary.
The subject is a humanized lake even if people are rarely seen, usually just their traces. A mysterious lake.
The lake is made up of myriads of tiny drops of water, it is a powerful representation that existence is never stable, it is nothing but fluctuating ripples, it is a set of vibrations, it is a world of events. The lake is a great mass, much more than a man but still identifiable by him. It always seems the same, but at every moment it changes because it is a balance between inflowing and outflowing rivers, between rainwater and evaporation. Man is not present or is not the main subject; in the works there are the traces left by man; the humanization of the lake is an evident presence even if it is an ephemeral imprint left in a short time, around and in a lake that was there before and will be there after us, even if it too has a short life on a geological scale and infinitesimal on a cosmic scale.
The language used manifests a plausible vision of reality, not a true one; reality is apparent, blurred, foggy, slightly distorted. The works seem like monochromes, under certain lights even black and white, but then you discover that they have shades, green and yellow colors, some unsaturated blues, warm blacks. What is absent is pure white, there are only apparent whites. It is an invitation to pay attention. If we are not very attentive in looking, we are not able to see reality, it is implied that we are tied to a fallible retinal vision, incapable of living the real. The same sight, the sense we rely on most, we use distractedly but trust blindly. The atmosphere, the color are the result of my imagination, of the application of the memory of certain atmospheres that have been superimposed or mixed with real ones. Often there is a green that belongs to me, it is the one when the sun has set behind the mountains and announces the passage into the twilight that precedes darkness. Usually this moment is said to be the blue hour, but in the case of the lake surrounded by much green of nature I see green predominating. It is a phenomenon of diffused and colored light, it is evocative and exciting. It is a space of silence, contemplative. It represents a moment crossed by a subtle melancholy that, however, contains great hopes expressed by the yellow of the waxes present in the skies.
Is it photography, is it something else? The starting point is photographic, its execution is typical of pictorialist photography: the application of vignetting, the reference to the lexicon of pinhole photography, the use of a reduced chromatic scale. But the digital interventions, the wooden base, the coloristic intervention through the choice and use of waxes and resins, the structuring of the surfaces with hot irons lose the indexical value proper to photography and open up to something else. We are on the thin border between index and icon. The use of wood, image transfer, waxes and resins actually take us into the realm of mixed media.
The choice of a slow technique is also a personal condition that favors reflection and the reaction to the times of contemporaneity in which everything is consumed quickly without taking the duty and the pleasure of slow discovery, of deepening ourselves and what we are able to learn and do, precisely through slow making.