Carole A. Feuerman - Andrea Guastavino Duo Solo Exhibition
17/01/2018 - 21/01/2018
Artworks
Re Vision is a project born from recovered archives of an early 20th century Florentine photographer, reprinted and re-elaborated in the darkroom by Andrea Guastavino.
Sometimes events in life truly embody the power of destiny. And such was the case when, like a lost letter, one that arrives after many years, discarded boxes of old glass photographic negatives were discovered by mere chance by Guastavino. A fragile treasure of unpublished photographs, a forgotten archive of memories where the images are silent witnesses of past stories.
What better destination for photographs who’ve been orphaned of eyes, abandoned to oblivion and not yet printed, than to wind up in the hands of a photographer who still loves to prepare acid baths, and to sail in the darkness within the infinite folds of a timeless reality.
RE FLECTION
The glass negatives discovered, had been sealed in boxes for more than one hundred years and, in many cases, time left its mark by oxidizing and stacking the negatives together, creating casuals and unexpected overlaps. This new images pushed the artist to recreate and compose a labirinth of images that live in absence of time.
Like an alchemist, Guastavino prints the antiques negatives in the darkroom with traditional and handmade techniques, and experiments by having the images floating in wax baths in order to transport their weight of memory and overcome their two-dimension nature. Through this process the images transcend to a new shape, more closely related to a relic or an icon.
The use of the wax add a tactical gaze to the work, enforcing the artist will to to shape the intimate space of the memory’s image, and expanding it to new optics.
VOX COELI
The negatives selected for Vox Coeli, are unpublished photographs from the First World War, and often show strange military machines, the “Aerofoni”; advanced military and anti-aircraft devices that look to be coming straight out of a Circus. In this project appear men listening to the skies, trying to intercept the enemy, but when Andrea Guastavino reprints them, they become hunters of whispers of a memory that is created in that precise istant. For the artist, the skies transmute in
a intimate theatre, full of explosions and silent sounds, covering and discovering differents chapters inside the image.
The figures chosen for Vox Coeli are investigating the invisible, looking to anticipate the visible. They are examinating the distance between the light and the sound, between what we see and what we hear or feel, suspended in an instant and waiting for a sign.