PARALLELLS, INTEREFERENCES, DISAPPEARANCES

The series Parallels, Interferences, Disappearances was conceived with the aim of being able to broaden the expressive possibilities in my research work. To go beyond the single shot signifies making a possible dialogue between different images, which allows for the emergence of latent meanings, or to broaden them as well as to activate new ones. Deciding to place images of different places and periods next to each other becomes a post-production job of research. In fact, the selection is a process which happens after production. For me, the camera is just a means by which to express my thought, and that’s why it is crucial that the moment of the shot remain free and spontaneous.

Angela Pietribiasi

Talking about Angela Pietribiasi’s work requires a subtle distinction: The ideological and conceptual intentions on one side, and the forms they take on by displaying themselves in photographic images. You could object that that subsists – even if, we know very well, the subtle distinction is theoretical, as works of art are realized in the synthesis of both points- in any artistic expression: form and content. But to say that in Angela Pietribiasi the two sides oppose each other in some way, in the sense of an opposition between the dramatic urgency of the contents and the tapered rigor of the visual choices, the rarified solution of the images steeped with poetry which tend to transmit intense convictions with the extreme purification of the means used. This is obviously to the photographer’s/artist’s advantage, being able to translate the meaningfulness of the idea, leading her to compose them into, at times almost abstract, images.
Angela says all of this with a series of diptychs which she has called ‘Parallels, Interferences, Disappearances’, where two different images are in some way connected.
The two white plates on white, an emptiness; the other filled with tiny, metallic crosses in their immaculate, formal perfection, demonstrate an absence and, with the crosses, a metaphoric sacrifice, carried out somewhere to satisfy our needs.

It’s a reflection that stems from the images, falling back onto acquired practices and aim at urging a change. Even here, we are struck by the extreme reduction of visual presences, by the constituent cleansing and by the poetic sense that comes from it. And the examples pile up. There’s the oil tanker emitting an excessive volume of hazardous smoke on the horizon of a sparkling sea placed beside the image of a sea bird all intent on investigating a rusty basin, the testimony of a decaying environment (Angela worked a lot on abandoned sites) which recalls seagulls weighed down with petrol. Or the beached whale and, conversely, the sunken ship, that is, two beings dead because of antithetic causes: the man by drowning and the animal by having remained out of the water. So, here are the parallels, interferences, disappearances the photographer/artist is looking for in her observation of the real and the man-environment relationship in which Angela Pietribiasi’s precious investigation takes place.

Maria Campitelli