"CAMERE IN PRESTITO"

Curated by Angela Madesani

Exhibition: 15 September – 30 November, 2016
Opening: Thursday, 15 September, 6-8pm

Marco Antonetto is pleased to present at his gallery in Lugano, Photographica FineArt, an exhibition space devoted completely to 1900' and contemporary photography, the exhibition "Camere in prestito" (Cameras for rent) curated by Angela Madesani, thus opening a new chapter in its artistic history.

"Camere in prestito" is a collection of 16 artists belonging to that particular period between the 60's and 70's where the artistic Western art world manifested a pictorial and sculptural object crisis. Many were then the artists who would take to using technological media such as photography, film, and later video.

Camere in prestito is an attempt at discovering at a large scale a field of art history, which, over forty years later, reveals all its interest and appeal. Precisely at this particular historical period traditional art languages come to a kind of zeroing. Many felt the need to confront themselves with reality through a neutral instrument of objective data recording.

The exhibition includes works that can be placed in distinct areas of those Italian artists who have a widely different history from each other but, who have in common the use of the photographic language in different variations. Photography as inclusion (collage), as documentation or even as the use of photographic techniques ranging from Polaroids to silver gelatin sensitized paper or canvas.

The exhibition, hanging on the sixteen walls of the gallery – one per artist – unfolds like a path that accompanies visitors through the various experiences.

Starting from the sixties with Vincenzo Agnetti who experimented among other things, with the use of photography by redefining the field of conceptual art in Italy in close relationship with the American experience. His work is an absolute reflection of a linguistic matrix; the same as for Paolo Gioli who manipulates the photographic instrument, with an avant-garde attitude, by emptying it out in order to reach its essence, its ground zero.

Franco Vimercati in the seventies, explores the meaning of photography. The fundamental research of Franco Vaccari is the theory of the concept of real-time exposure, which finds an important example in the work Leave a trace of your passage, created for the Venice Biennale in 1972. Vaccari like Cioni Carpi is a protagonist of Narrative Art, the re-creation of a temporal situation through the use of sequence. The example in this context is in fact seen on the work on display by Carpi "We created atypical systems", an analysis of a social-anthropological matrix.

Of an anthropological matrix is also the work by Michele Zaza, whose research is strongly influenced by the Mediterranean culture of his background. The problem of keeping alive the avant-guarde concept is of primary importance for Bruno Di Bello, who uses a cold medium that has a privileged relationship with reality. Claudio Parmeggiani processes, elaborates the photographic image. Here too there is a clear link with the history of art, but it is never a citation. His works are, rather, fragments of memory.

Aldo Tagliaferro, over the years, has created a reflection of an existential nature in which the photographic medium becomes the protagonist. As well as Giorgio Ciam in whose work we find the idea of the self as presence-absence, and in close dialogue with the surroundings.

The conceptualists Maurizio Nannucci and Ketty La Rocca, the only female presence in the exhibition and the undisputed star of Body Art, come from the Florentine visual poetry world.

Particular interest is focused on the relationship between photography and the Arte Povera artists, through the works of the three protagonists of that movement: Giuseppe Penone, Giulio Paolini and Gilberto Zorio.

Photography, for artists, becomes an objective way to fix the moment in an unique encounter between space and time, perfectly related to the history of a complex period, indeed that period that goes from the end of the sixties to the end of the next decade. This is the way Italian art places itself in close dialogue with what was happening in the rest of the world, maintaining, however, its own, original features as "Camere in prestito" wants to highlight.