On Thursday 11 October, on the eve of the 14th edition of ArtVerona, Studio la Città will be opening the show by Vincenzo Castella titled Trame senza fissa dimora, inspired by the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky.
Those who know the artist from his work on the urban landscape will be surprised by this latest series of works; in them the city is not the centre of attention but its place is taken by nature, presented by Castella in large-format colour prints, together with contact prints and 3 videos: Studio Eine Phantastik, Zurigo N° 1 and N° 2, and another one on the Finnish landscape taken from an original negative.
This is how the artist describes in just a few lines the basic idea of the show:
the spirit of my work is that of looking at and of thinking about certain moments of representing the plant world and of the presence of botany in the history of art, and of observing the various moments when images are formed by concentrating attention exclusively on the final form of the work. To think of the world of “nature” in a collective and cultural way and not as an individual operation for redemption and privilege in order to compensate for political and ideological deficiencies.
His vision is quite different from that of documentary photographers who use photography as a form of description of nature. For Castella the crux of the matter is to be found in showing a genuine lateral “vision” of what surrounds us, because our gaze does not in itself see; rather, in the artist’s words, vision is something quite different from looking.
In Vincenzo Castella’s work there are many links to literature, cinema, art history, and music: everything is useful for the construction of the work and indicates a direction to the observer, often overturning the iconography, the preconceptions, and the prejudices about the landscape and its vision: for Castella an important political contribution.
