On display are two large photos with dark tones by Massimo Vitali, the first Ponta dos Mosteiros Dark (2018) was taken in the Azores Islands, an archipelago in the Atlantic with a temperate climate. On the peaks of the volcanoes it rains almost every day and on the beach it’s sunny almost every day. Here the light employed is natural. The rocky background of volcanic origin is so dark that the colors of the swimwear and objects stand out. Here everything is lava, everything is hard and sharp, and light changes very quickly.
It is as if through people, the presences that populate his photograph and make it immediately recognizable, Vitali redesigns the space, remeasures it through another category. His is a social, highly anthropized space that we can connect to his education. “Human presences, which are what attracts me the most, have a major influence on the space that surrounds them. My photos represent a mix between the architecture of the landscape and the influence man has on landscape itself”¹. Human presence, also in this case, colorful and normalizing, defuse the situation. So does the man in the blue swimwear who becomes a sort of punctum, to quote Roland Barthes.
1. M. Vitali from a conversation with the curator, Angela Madesani December 2021.
Angela Madesani, curator of the exhibition Ridisegnare lo spazio at Labs Contemporary Art, Bologna, February 12 – April 5, 2022.