[A – stràt – to]
Simplicity, rigour, minimalism, geometry and abstraction. The photography projects achieved by Luca Cacioli over the years, although being distinct from each other, share the same research matrix: the shape. Not to be understood as a means to exploit expression, but as expression itself.
From his first work “Confini” to “La Nuvola”, not forgetting “Surrealismo”, “Notturni urbani”, “Details” and “[A – Strat -to]”, what comes out is an orderly path that tends to subtraction. This, not so much in terms of quantity, but rather by showing realistic elements in a context detached from reality, not only as a pure transposition of an object from nature. The photographer indeed is not only increasingly attracted to urban and industrial architecture. He does observe and analyse elements, highlighting the less realistic and figurative side, and therefore, more properly expressed, the abstract side. In [A – STRAT – to] he is no longer interested in composing a well built image (Surrealismo) or in cutting spaces and structures, enhancing geometries (Notturni Urbani) and not even in focusing on specific details (Details). He now aims to put into light every detail of the surface, featuring mostly the texture. Colour, substance and all physical components substance is made of, lines, every millimetric element is fixed instead of the captured object. This project revolves around the observation and the obsessive adjustment of the selected item, which loses its status as item thanks to the picture itself.
Going back to “Confini”, you cannot avoid dwelling on some connections: human and artificial elements, which stood in the past between man and landscape, play today the lead role, up to being explored in their consistency and development areas.
Unusual is the freedom of reading and consequently of imaging that the photographer grants the looker through this series: both orientation and image are a prerogative of the observer. Solid forms that fill up eyes through the negation of the unessential and of the straight and immediate individuation of the the photographed shape. They have a physical perimeter on paper, but do not have real borders: they extend beyond the frame. This way the movement is twofold: deep into the matter, multidirectional on the surface. The process that they determine does not pertain to any questions as to the essence of the object, but mostly lead to an attitude of protracted contemplation.
Details_
It isn’t trivial and even less immediate compare oneself to places well-etched in a collective immagination. Even more if these places were already aim of the study, vison and translation by others. We always are worried about doing something repetitive,monotonous and banal. Today in photography and in art we want amaze and surprise, trying to propose something new. However there is no physical reality, subject or technique that can overcome the lack of a new vision. It’s the look that counts, that is the way and the time of observation, reflection and reworked version of what we see and what we want to affirm or deny. Originally Luca Cacioli watched at ex factory for his history. Yet the choice of location was made in order to formal reasons, because in the place the photographer has seen the signs of his visual alphabet.
Objects suspended and isolated, geometric structure of iron and cloth, surfaces eroded and worn-out: Details that suggest quiet and rarefied atmosphere, but especially a tendency to abstraction in forms, lines and points. The use of white and black recalls a kind of careful analysis of selected subjects, which is further developed when it is transposed to the particulars. By the search of the structural framework not of macroarchitecture, but of the microjoint of the elements – the fulcrums of the composition are fixed, orienting the reading. Nevertheless, the tension in the removal and mental vision of the objective doesn’t involve the loss of contact with the object. In fact, the subject is always recognizable : a neon remains that, like the roller curtains or iron tubes. All these “words”, going beyond their status, are bundles of vectors, lines and diagonals. This translation of signs is the point of the project, and it find in standard particulras the sense of personal study and in the becoming.
Moving from purely formalist approach, and therefore observing the project on the content and context , the story emerges. The seized details are the rest of a dismembered body: a cathedral became non-lieu. Lebole from symbol of rebirth, liberation, industrialization and revolution to mirror of our times: a battlefield, a crumbling theater on whose the stage support as masks precariousness, uncertainty carelessness and temporariness. The decay of values, mixed with the inability to look with honesty and clarity at the past, ends up to obscure the vision of a better future that can release this present fragmented, disconnected, difficult, suspended in limbo and perpetually raped. A time of which this space is a metaphor.
Tiziana Tommei
OXYMORONS
Matter, space and time are dreamlike and they develop on its own rules, unhinged by method prearranged and by rules approved. Within a dream any reference crumbles to physical parameters and to the concrete existence of the real. Sometimes there is a sense of confusion and uncertainty, and yet we end up being attracted and captured in that crazed dimension. We are sometimes in doubt about the extent of the same dream, because it is confused with the real world. Explaing we question our state: “Am I dreaming? It is reality or fiction? Where am I?”.
Frames from a movie with no story, no narration, assembled for combinations of images in accordance to a encoded and encrypted logic. A bust and some mirrors; a sequence of eyes are dominated by a chandelier, a table of empire style dominates a impercetible, vague and sublunar setting. Magic boxes, fragments of dreams, apparent surreality where everything is entirely defined, clear, organised and orderly. A real and credible dimension, that is at the same time visionary and crazed. We are in a private abode where we can find an atmosphere of strong dedication to art and beauty. We look inside a cube where matter, relating to the concrete world, becomes word for structuring a metaphysical discourse.
Luca Cacioli builds, manipulates, cuts, substitutes, puts together and chooses extra normal objects, blocking them in snap-shots in which everything is calculated to the incongruities. There is always a small detail that breaks the perfection of the totality- the angle line of the wall in the lower mirror isn’t completely centered; the chandelier, the drops which don’t follow the simmetry of the underlying sequence; the game of weights ,including ornaments, table and lamp which drives the eye to the reading of the image, by defining a mobile balance, moved now to the right, now to the left. The accident wakes up the observer, admonishing him about the real nature of what he observes.
Dreams, Reflections and Fragments constitute a triptyque in which plausibility and abstraction are con-fused, exalting all boundaries between reality and imagination.
Tiziana Tommei – Art Curator
The visible and the invisible.
The photographic project CONFINE represents an important phase in the conceptual and educational path of Luca Cacioli: class 1991 , he just approaches to the photographic medium, the fundamental impression that we can see through his photograph is the research of a relationship between human eyes, potentiality of the means and the image.
Cacioli ask himself about the border that isn’t detectable. that should separate the look and the image. The systematic research of line of escape to overwrite to the real data becomes the main instrument to look for the connection between human look and the image; the visual architecture doesn’t delimit the physical space within a precostituite cages, but it creates a code where register the enlightened connection between man, the medium and the space: Cacioli confirms that the imeges represent our look and at the same time he contests this idea because looks are not represented and incomprehnsible.
The images are created in the phisycal data but they become visible through the medium of photography; indeed the photographer describes the project with this words: “there are no limits, the human look can see to the infinity”.