Mimmo Jodice at Villa Bardini, Florence
MIMMO JODICE
Senza tempo
March 24 - July 14, 2024
Villa Bardini - Fondazione CR Firenze
Costa San Giorgio 2, IT-50125 Florence
An exhibition exploring the work of one of the leading masters of Italian photography, on display in Florence for the very first time. The exhibition also includes a new section showcasing Jodice’s images of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s Florentine sculptures, which are emerging from the great photographer’s archives for the first time in thirty years.
80 photographs taken between 1964 and 2011 embrace the most important themes that Mimmo Jodice has addressed in the course of his artistic career, broken down into eight sections entitled Anamnesis, Languages, Views of Naples, City, Nature and Sea.
They range from his sequence of statuary faces and ancient mosaics for architect Gae Aulenti’s Museo station on the Naples underground, to his dark-room experiments of the ‘sixties where he turned the rules of photography on their head, pushing – and indeed overstepping – their very boundaries.
The Views of Naples section, on the other hand, reveals the artist’s restless nature with his indecipherable, enigmatic panoramas suspended in a rarified time made of voids and absences. Jodice’s exploration of his native city, however, was simply a starting point, preparing him to go on to tackle other cityscapes such as Boston, Paris, São Paulo, Rome, Milan and Tokyo in a search for the void capable of responding to his inability to accept chaos and madness, where, in excluding all noise, he encounters a new, personal and metaphysical dimension.
This narrative contrasts with Jodice’s Nature which is unashamedly aggressive and unwelcoming, triggering a feeling of malaise in the observer and forcing us to change the way we look at the world around us. And finally, the Sea, where time for Jodice appears to stand still for good. He spends hours staring at it, discovering the dimension of the absolute in its seeming flatness, in the circular movement of waves breaking on the shore, in the repetitive action of natural gestures.
