27.MAY.2004 24.JUL.2004
LUIGI GHIRRI IMAGINARY GEOGRAPHY
The main character, like a few artists in Italy of the seventies and the eighties, certainly does not only operate in the field of the photography, Luigi Ghirri still has many facets to reveal. To be able to review,a group of his important works, like this exhibition allows with a precision that gives scope to satisfaction, is an opportunity not to miss.
The richnesses of his work, that has already been given to the interpretations of the conceptual in the first instance and then to the postmodern, is not really reducible and still conceals a deeper poetic quality.
“A book to stay and one to go”, he wrote about Album di famiglia and about Atlante, these two books that, when he was child at home, and leafed through with great fascination, he found for the first time, photography. Actually the two subjects and two genres are the foundation of photography as ever, one of memory and another of documentation, one of narration and another of description, one of illustration and another of landscape; the interior and the exterior, the history and the place, the private and the public, the “two categories of the world” as synthesized by Ghirri. But never the one without the other, is Ghirri’ sign, the synthesis itself of his pursuit: the image is an imaginary geography, a map not so much of an imaginary place, as an imaginary place itself, but it sets off the imagination, space that sparks off time, fixity that moves; and even more, starting from here: it is through the visual signs that is possible to discover the world ( the map of the world), it is through the journey of the intensified ( the telescope, replaced by the camera) that learns “to think with the images” and gives to them the same reality as that of the world.
An “Italian” lesson – as he suggests with the title of his project for the eighties, Italian Landscape – that is still to be verified and doubtless to be repeated. In the days of the re-proposal of various Atlas’, from the one of Richter and of Fischli & Weiss to the one of Warburg, we can review this one of Ghirri with its essential differences.
With more than sixty of Luigi Ghirri’s most photographs, from the Fund Heirs Luigi Ghirri, the exhibition is edited by Elio Grazioli