“The artist simply has to portray the world as he sees it. His power to change it is commensurate with the clarity and sincerity in the way he places himself within the picture”
Vik Muniz in ch. 6 Crystals, Grains, Dirty negatives from Reflex
My life has been guided by the simplest encounters with real or unreal characters in books and movies that contrasted an imposed solitude created by dangerous surroundings and a protective family that used the house as a fortress. As Montaigne wrote, only solitude can train the soul to survive loneliness and in those days and still now I travel with my mind to the places I only know by written or visual description.
In points of departures nothing is clearly defined and yet you are moved.
The 6 pictures of this exhibit have names such as Mitte or Charlotte, clues that tell you very little about precise location and yet they provide a vague idea, a sense of place. The grain, texture and the tone make you wonder if they were taken recently or a century ago. You get closer to check if they are actually pictures in watercolour-like paper or paintings or if, as in Swann's Way, we are given pictures of paintings to add an artistic layer to the mechanical reproduction.
A look at the pictures bounces back as a thought, a memory, a place-not quite like the one portrayed-but yet outlined by the diffuse traces, the gestural marks in the print.
Like the Invisible cities described by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan, you realize that the story told by the images is completed by you, as a viewer, in a dialogue where the eyes are not the ones commanding the story, but the mind.
Contemplating these images, in solitude, there is no loneliness as they are an invitation to travel, to construct a world and that city that only exists in the space in between. They are just a point of departure for each one of us to find the best possible reality and “the invisible reasons which make cities live”.
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