Vista III - Limited Edition of 6 Photograph

What was there before photography, asks John Berger in his astute essay from Ways of Seeing? The most obvious answer is painting, engraving, drawing, and more enlightening: memory. Berger continues, "a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it." The Bergsonian concept of time consciousness is relativized and opposed to the concept of scientific time, a measurable, set of multiple simultaneities, causing a moment to be always unique because it was perceived and processed by the ego, the sensitivity, from memory, not in a successive dynamic but as a clew or an avalanche. This relativity extends also to the concept of space, not only measurable and analysable from a scientific point of view, mathematical, functional, but from a perspective of emotion and memory. Medieval friars knew it well, using the spaces of the convent to build mnemonically the sequence of their sermons: retracing in the mind those places that would have strung together the sequence of the arguments there "responded to." The concept of (cultural) landscape is a fifteenth-century invention. By definition, landscape is that part of the territory embraced by the gaze from a certain point of view. But what happens when the landscape is devoid of reference points? The absolute landscapes are what Stefano Bevacqua calls: the sea, the sky, the desert. "They contain only themselves", lack points of reference, challenge our perceptual abilities since our eyes cannot embrace the immensity, there are no clues to define a beginning and an end, they reveal their own boundlessness and our contemporary limit. Not only does the sequence of places of memory not seem to work here, but apparently the mechanisms of perception and memory related to a specific place and at a given time fail to work. Because place and time are elusive and not circumscribed. If we attempted to name what the photographs of Luca Lupi - including those here - represent the list would begin and end quickly: clouds, sea, sky, mountains, coast, birds in flight, snow, trees, lightning, cities, walls. Sometimes the titles help to redefine the geographical boundaries, identify places. Give us the comfort of the "where". But then, looking at them, one has the impression that the issues of time and space are not measured through the surface of the image and its sequencing with respect to a geographical before and after, but rather in respect to a depth and to a three-dimensionality that builds space and time. And that duration rests upon on the many details that are highlighted: foam, the velvety surface of the waves, types of clouds, leaves. Quantity often gives a sense of randomness: flocks of birds, snowflakes. The sequence sometimes turns into a comparison with a before and after to which one gives temporal coordinates: the image is layered in a given time. The time of a wave, of a bolt of lightning. Sequences adjustable but elusive. Traces of events. In one frame (which is the first cut of the image) nothing takes place. But this nothing is at the same time the result of and creates memory by virtue of a fundamental ambiguity: it can relate to the time of the event, the space generated by transient events (light brings forth angles and builds surfaces), the overlap of sea and skyline, clouds that on closer inspection seem like waves, waves that seem like sky. And, through progressive approaches and retreats, substance is denied to concrete things (cities, coastlines), and ascribed to the less concrete. Homes and buildings are captured through curtains, there is a certain pleasure in indefinite misty landscapes, sharp subjects are undefined, objects and events are projected in an archetypal dimension affording us the experience of them and through them of subjective time and space. Ilaria Mariotti

Photography:Color on Paper

Artist Produced Limited Edition of:6

Size:39.4 W x 27.6 H x 0.1 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.