AURA…the breath of the atmosphere


“…trovassi al fiume in un boschetto adorno che lievemente la fresca aura muove.”
L. Ariosto

I'm going to introduce a new work by Giovanni Bigazzi, an artist who keeps looking for different languages and  possible understandings with his photograph. I firmily believe that the sought correspondence can be glimpsed, indeed found and then understood.
It 's a work that arises in the perception of senses and  lends itself  to a different and possible interference between images and an inner journey , where the attention stare in silence  the radius of an atmosphere.

I present this work by quoting a thought of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas , " ... I often  let an image produce an emotion in me, and then I apply it my critical and intellectual knowledge ... ". In the mind, or rather, in the eyes of Bigazzi , subjective meanings and their  "sound" show themselves  only if the viewer see a theme and then diversify natural learnings .
This happens only  if the vision is fundamental and apparently in contradiction, as if to say what I feel is so evident in what I see that I just listen to it and everything becomes magic and desire, and only if my breath allows me to savor the docile wind of a birth or a death , I can choose to dwell and violate the intimate " story". Because the artist invites  to see a story that is rampant in different and possible poetical ambivalences which become images , photographs , as in a scene without a subject , they manage to tell a possible dialogue

The photographs we see are carefully chosen, and not only in their representation, but also in a certain selection technique . In this work, the possibility of a light, of a shadow , a contrast , a variable chrome plating , have a explanatory sense only in thier unity , creating the continuity of an image up to collide with the essentiality of a perceptible atmosphere and the creation of an emotional sequence .His work appears to be only a straw, made of symbols and natural substances , which in the beginning have a shape and later become metaphors of the same identity .
I would like to touch on some of the photos that Giovanni Bigazzi installed . I don’t want to draw a technical profile or a critical judgment , but just a look at the same look that the artist has decided to stop.
The intricacy of images and pint of view in the stages that summarize all the imaginary path, lead us to some statements of subjective character, but also purely emozional.

The decision to draw a symbiontic deciphering  and then be devoted to the figure of a possible myth, let us enjoy any interpretation, but the accuracy chosen by the artist for the spaces and images send us immediately in the subject and in the allegory of the “journey”.

Density of signs is evident in the shots shine through the diaphragmatic and chromatic spectrum and polished grinding of the subject barely hinted; a glimpse of the essence of the form makes the viewer able to racognize the strength and the evironment, such as an antique mirror, where the reflection shows obvious and cloudy to the point of grazing and vary every guise.

The evocation of images is apparently subjected to fragments of nature, or rather at angle of landscapes, such as surrounding zones. The figures are slightly  changed by a primordial wind, where plants rely in white putrid swap or in scrap anthropomorphic wood, exchanging shadows with real substance and living rise to a “journey” of the soul.
These zones, so addicted to attend a time and flee from this through the natural flow of life, push the choice of the artist towards a restless spirituality, but sure of salvation at the same time.

Bigazzi with his photo-zone system,in relation to the assumption of poetry, let the silence and expectation create a fantastic insight, a question without an answer.
The photographs are installed following the story, not the space around and remind me of a 1979 film by Andrei Tarkovsky's " Stalker"; an important work, where the plot is subjected to the time of the images and reign with power and deep sensitivity in the eyes of the observer.
A movie full of photography intented to the story, that’s why I thought spontaneously of this association: the director chooses to place silence as the primary subject to mark the time of his shots. Bigazzi, along the same semantic pattern, acquires the logic and the sense and, with total agreement, brings himself in that same formal metaphor to understand the importance of the subject making it special and fragment .

Giovanni chooses the same "topographic” build to arrange photographs, he enlarges the vision toward the symbolization of the photographed subjects. The artist chooses the sacred legend, the “Aura” surrounding symbols that makes them search for a "Garden of Eden" rich of attendance found in myth and, as a requiem, is extreme with the sign of the element and slightly spreads the placate voices of nature in the deepest.
I just want to add that the high photographic research of Giovanni Bigazzi, in this project, has ventured in a different way to make possible their own needs. The stern tone with which he tries to get in touch with the feeling takes him far away, where the beginning and the end are the same thing, and like a fire slowly pushed by a slight breeze, it can become a bonfire.
And now that the artist has chosen to recount it’s our task to read his images, and transmute the simple fact in a deeper relationship.



"... I would like turn and run
         In the hidden land
        But the noisy sun
            down baptizes
                the sky. "

Dylan Thomas


Massimo Innocenti
August 2013