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What is the fine line that distinguishes art from photography? What if photography and art were more related than we can imagine? Elisa Larese, curator and founder, with her husband Alessandro Cerioli, of Tablinum Cultural Management in Bellagio, Como (Italy) explains it to us, and will open it doors to “Caravaggio Reloaded”, the first solo exhibition of photographer/artist Paolo Angelillo.
“Photography is a way to capture the immediacy of artistic inspiration but it is not without discipline, it requires rigorous expertise. Just as in the works of Caravaggio, who gives us glimpses of life almost stolen and yet reworked on canvas. Photography responds to the needs of our modern age but, in the hands of an artist, it becomes a revealing look at our world, laying bare souls, revealing emotions. I like to think that a contemporary Caravaggio, master of the use of revealing light, narrator of a painting made of poor and marginalized characters, able to talk about taboo subjects for his own age, transported in the 21st century, would choose photography as a means to tell the humanity that surrounds him. Perhaps we would find him capturing with his lens the last ones: in the hospital wards, in the suburbs of the metropolis or among those who flee from wars towards a better future. Caravaggio has always been resoundingly contemporary, and for this reason his art fulfills the purest and most necessary task for an artist: that of embodying the spirit of his own era, recounting and transmitting what his contemporaries still do not understand. In this sense photography is not very different from oil and canvas: both are mediums of an artistic message that speaks to our humanity and that we must welcome and understand because it belongs to us” says Elisa Larese.
The project “Caravaggio RELOADED” was born as a personal creative outlet of the artist who, after approaching music, art and photography, only as a shy interpreter, decided to release his artistic spirit through a mixture of photography and painting.
In Angelillo’s images the language of Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio, is renewed using the same wild irreverence of the painter, but in the form of irony.
“The objects are used in an inappropriate, almost disturbing, but strongly evocative way, this helps me to direct the viewer to my thinking while always leaving a door open for him to find his meaning reflected in the objects and gestures in a dialogue between past and present.” said the artist. Angelillo argues that the real challenge was to understand the pictorial language and point of view with which Caravaggio treated the themes of his time, and then extrapolate them from their historical context so that they could have the same impact on today’s audience.
The exhibition, besides being the flagship of the artistic review “New Art Order 2021”, seals the collaboration between Tablinum Cultural Management and the gallery Art Folder of Chiasso (Switzerland) and will be open, at the latter, from 11 to 26 September, 2021.
The exhibition will also be accompanied by poems written by Innocente Foglio inviting the viewer to new scenarios of reflection.
(On the title: The Translator of Dreams by Paolo Angelillo)
