These portraits refer exactly to the “not said” and “not seen”. Inhumanity and its evidence are in the process that has caused the effects we see, and the portrait leads us to internalize the inner condition of the person represented, irrespective of the fact that it is the (objective) reality or an emblematic pictorial representation. Despite our overexposed media exposure to even worse and cynical violent images, these shake deeply and dig into us, just because we cannot avoid “interiorizing” them.
We are called to participate in a pain that has a clearly cathartic and revealing function. We usually defend ourselves from the tough truths of drama, fleeing, turning our eyes, going away fast, but if we decide to really participate in the pain by observing it, we may perceive all the injustice to which it is bound. Looking into the face of the drama digs the sense of “just” and unjust inside us, while we question about “why”, “still?”, or “never again”.
In the large compositions, however, we observe the “concatenations” that lead to the drama, thus centering on the underlying issue: we men are so strongly bound in the Good as in the Evil that the cause of discomfort or of salvation is exactly in the ways in which our relationships concatenate. The atmosphere is dull, baroque, agitated. The disturbance of lines and lights crosses the tableaux vivants and portraits. In large compositions, tragedy is collective, invisible and hidden, in a telluric and obscure context, cut out, outlined by dramatic light. In photographic portraits (which are actually also thought and constructed as “paintings”), the same lights, the composition and looks offer an inexhaustible range of forms of piety, pride, challenges, and interiority that are a part of a struck Humanity but never completely resigned and destroyed.
But more develops from this assumption. In other research projects, between 2012 and 2014, portrait completes and connects its inner dimension with the environment and space, opening up to the counterpoint of pieces of “world” and powerfully symbolic “still natures”, thus narrating the relationship of a “person” with the world (Landing), or, through graphic interventions, symbolic structures, lights, visual and chromatic fittings between different elements, inner personality is reconnected with the space “beyond” and with the narrative of the inner development of the “person” (Unseen).
This is why Starting from ThisHumanity, this self-consciousness, through pain, is not the word “end” but it is the beginning, the “zero point” from which to restart in oneself to say “never again”, to say that behind all this, the “Person”, i.e. the Man aware of himself and of his story, part of the search for “Other”, which has nevertheless become more true, stronger and more conscious than ever about what is just, unjust, noble, or ignoble. This is true in portraits, for those looking at them.