(by Nicoletta Castagni)
A retrospective of leading
Italian photographer Franco Fontana, 81, will be on show at
Rome's Palazzo Incontro starting Wednesday through January 11.
The exhibit will showcase 130 of the most significant
photos by the Modena native, who describes himself as a
"heretic".
"I chose color when everybody was taking pictures in black
and white, I chose landscapes and cities when everyone was doing
political and social reportage," he said on the eve of the
exhibit's opening.
The show will display the master's most famous series, from
the urban landscapes of his debut in 1961 to the photos taken
over the last decades - including American swimming pools,
vintage cars and other iconic images.
Known for the bands and curving swathes of bright,
intensely saturated colors criss-crossing the flat perspectives
of his fields, deserts, and seascapes, the artist refuses to
label his work as abstract.
"The only abstract thing about them is the thought behind
them, but what I have been photographing throughout my life is
real," commented the aging master, who is proud of the fact that
he never uses Photoshop or any other digital retouching program.
The large-scale prints opening the show date back almost
half a century.
"The ambiguity of his vision is a mix of poetry and
passion," said curator Denis Curti.
"He reinvented the visual vocabulary of an era".
By eschewing narrative and choosing instead to focus on
images in which nothing appears to be happening, Fontana opened
up a kind of meditation filled with references to Pop Art, to
the painterly metaphysics of Giorgio de Chirico and the
crystalline atmospheres of Edward Hopper, whose canvases are
peopled with alienated individuals caught in vivid, almost
violent colors.
Very much a part of his homeland and his era, Fontana's
visual culture takes us on a voyage through layers of history
and time, both social and individual.
"By the end of the exhibit, one feels one is gazing at an
immense self-portrait," said Curti.
Currently, the photographer has turned his gaze elsewhere.
"For me, photography is the quality that life has given me,"
said the artist, whose latest book focuses on the beauty of
disabled people.
"I could have carried on doing the landscapes that made me
famous, but then I would have been playing Fontana for the rest
of my life, a kind of pensioner version of myself," he
concluded.
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