Mimmo Jodice: ATTESA
Galerie Karsten Greve AG, St. Moritz
Monday - Saturday 10 - 13 h / 14 - 18.30 h
Opening on Saturday, June 03, 2023, from 5 - 7 pm
“My work involves projecting in the mind, achieving it in the form of a photograph and then printing it in the highest possible quality.
Nothing else matters or, if it does, it is insignificant.”
Galerie Karsten Greve is pleased to present ATTESA, a solo show by the Italian artist Mimmo Jodice, showing works from his most recent project Attesa (Waiting). This selection is complemented by photographs from the Natura (Nature) series.
Mimmo Jodice explores the world that surrounds us, lingering on the thresholds of a time undefined. In his black and white photographs, past, present and future intertwine, abandoning all spatio-temporal markers to reach a dimension suspended between what is real and what only seems real. Attesa, his latest project, is the culmination of the research which the artist has been engaged in since the late 1980s, when he chose to forego the human form. From that moment on, and for over 30 years, time and experience have been the focus of his research.
Mimmo Jodice sees the Attesa project as not just a subject or method of investigation, but rather as a way of transforming the very idea of photography into an intellectual and artistic practice, imbued with all the poetic sensibility of the artist. In a world that no longer sleeps, he dwells on the awareness of time. Rows of waiting chairs, open windows, shadows, here only for a brief instant, sublime in their fugacity. A sense of waiting is present in every facet of the works shown, from the actual taking of the photograph to the subject: patiently waiting for the perfect light before clicking the shutter, waiting for the desired balance of detail and nuances in the dark room. The waiting that is apparent in the subjects themselves – empty chairs, deserted streets, open windows, desolate urban labyrinths.
Attesa. Opera 4 (2004) appears frozen in the moment. Outside of time, in the rhythm of the horizontal rows of chairs, the composition teeters on abstraction - calm and unagitated. Oblivious to the passage of time, the artist resounds with the peace and silence emanating from it. Empty rows of chairs, the only sign of a presence - from the past or perhaps from the future. The tension between this silence and the waiting for something unknown has reached a peak, intensified by the absence of reference points, which also forcing us to slow down and wait.
“I would like to quote Fernando Pessoa: but what was I thinking before I lost myself in looking? This phrase seems written for me, it describes my recurring state so well: losing myself in looking, imagining, pursuing a vision beyond reality.”
One of the greatest photographers of his generation, Mimmo Jodice is constantly reinventing photography, helping to free it from the boundaries of purely documentary interpretation and emphasize its representative potential. For Attesa, Jodice chose to use carbon printing; the first photographic process not to use silver. Patented in 1855 by Louis-Alphonse Poitevin and known to be extremely stable, it was the most widely used process in the nineteenth century. This technique enables Jodice to obtain highly contrasted images which offer absolute clarity, thus transforming the camera into what he calls “a time machine”. “What was I thinking before I lost myself in looking?” Fernando Pessoa’s words give us the greatest freedoms; the freedom to look but most of all to see and to feel the time passing, as it lightly makes its presence felt to anyone who attempts such an exercise.
