I VOLTI / ABOUT

I VOLTI. By Franco Bolelli

I confess I have never felt the slightest attraction to those images that show landscapes, objects, inanimate forms. I am interested in and passionate about human beings, and of human beings what interests me most of all are faces — what captivates me are faces. It happens to me on Facebook too, which, by being founded on the exposure of our faces, on their authenticity, has swept away that odious trend which — from the insufferable Baudrillard to the colossal bluff of Second Life — theorized fiction, simulation, hiding behind fictitious identities. Imagine, then, how much these Faces by Fabrizio Bergamo strike me. First and foremost because in these works he captures and highlights — far beyond pure aesthetics — the life that exists in a face. And then because these Faces tell us everything about time and age and the very essence of being human. The faces that Fabrizio stages have — there is no escaping it — an age: but at the same time their age does not at all coincide with the flatly bureaucratic one, because it is as if they contained all ages at once, the entire life journey of the people photographed, the here & now and the beyond of time, and all the experiences, the flashes, the marks, the strengths and the fragilities, the torments and the ecstasies that it took to make a person and a face what they are. These quintessential Faces are as they must be, as they cannot not be. Fabrizio shows their extraordinariness that is not at all strange, the strength and its dark side — inseparable, necessary, vital.

The illuminated Darkness by Mario Giusti

In an era in which everything is so much to be seen that it has tired everyone, being a professional photographer is a true adventure. Like a journey to Africa in the nineteenth century: the danger is getting lost, with the aggravating circumstance of being forgotten.

If then, let us say over the past twenty years, the same photographer is no longer content but, following an overbearing emotional spark, wants to surpass the limits of his professional repetitiveness and “become an artist”… well, the danger increases immeasurably, risking becoming a terrible banality!

The democracy of the image, its mass realization through technology and the containers of homemade performances — the social networks — has crushed the culture of seeing almost irredeemably: indeed the trend is toward the worse.

Then, one fine day, you happen to stumble upon those strange cases of redemption entrusted to art, which man manages to invent in the darkest and most difficult moments of his journey on earth: we had already had a taste of it with the ten portraits shown in December at the HQ-HEADQUARTER gallery in Milan, in the group show PICKS, IN-COMPLETO.

Before his bedeviled “picture gallery,” shaken by the absence of order and linearity, one seemed to be living an original description of the instant.

To put it in the words of Vladimir Jankélévitch: “…Time as an instant is an occasion for cognitive, moral, and artistic creation.”

A perfect synthesis of Bergamo’s quest to create the encyclopedia of faces — from the pain par excellence of the Shroud to the portraits of adventurous interpreters of art, all the way to ordinary people, where he found the spark: the multiform and polyvalent character of reality.

It is a strange sensation that captures you when you encounter Fabrizio Bergamo’s Faces in person.

People, artists, and flowers — the latter experienced as the gentle face of life. Portraits, and dark frames — wooden, materic, antique — enclosing a deep black.

Not a color, mind you, but rather a dimension that, as you draw closer, takes shape in the play of shadows, acquiring that three-dimensionality that only the intense magic of a portrait carries with it.

Then you no longer understand what you have before you — whether an extraordinary painterly citation, almost the rebirth of a contemporary Caravaggism, or… what? And here the extraordinary thing happens: the portrait captures you; what you cannot see because it is hidden by the masterful use of darks reaches you as an intuition or a fantastic visual stimulus.

The eyes function as if they could smell, hear, touch, and form a sensory, magical vision.

Bergamo takes us by the hand and leads us into his dimension, where darkness is illuminated, where the eternal sacred and the profane meet.

One senses the work the artist is doing on the symbolic transfiguration of man, drawing inspiration also from the Holy Shroud.

So curious as to create a formal and narrative relationship, not a conflict: it is the meeting of good and evil not as enemies but as parts of human nature.

All the dramatic work on light that Bergamo has done leads us to see a kinship with the work of Merisi da Caravaggio.