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€”EQUAL ONLY IN THE BEGINNING
YOU FEIGN TO BE FORM AND STEAL FORMS
BREAKING POINT
BLINDING LIGHT THAT PREVENTS SIGHT
EVERYTHING FADES OUT
THEN THE LIGHT COMES BACK”
Pallade Atena, by A.C. Bianchi
“Divine Cracks” represents the idealisation of the feminine essence as the source of creative rebirth, an ode to woman as her whole: life generator/object of male desire/regent of the universal order.
After a painful breakup I needed to get back in touch with myself, especially my masculinity and my torn relation to women (mother, ex-wife, lovers…); to do so I simply had to get close to the mystery of womanhood, chasing my very own version of Courbet’s “Origine du monde”. I started by reprinting an old negative of an ex-girlfriend of mine, pushing the contrast and exposure to the limit. The result I got I thought was extraordinary in its abstractness: an image that was at the same time eerily erotic and confusely evocative. I decided I would need to take this experiment further and turn it into a project.
I realised that the strong contrast of the print together with the detail of the framing would generate an abstraction of the human body, almost as if it were the marble statue of a classical “divinity”. The anatomic detail would be subtly revealed within the black of the line confining the erotic tension to an almost subconscious level. The result forms a “crack” (inspired by Lucio Fontana’s revolutionary cuts) in the white idyll of the paper that’s supposed to shatter all certainties of the male universe, a slight discomfort, a faint embarassment... the photographic medium reminds the viewer that everything is real, attainable, touchable, earthly yet uncanny. In the end every single image takes a life of its own, mutating into anything anyone sees in it.
The single images don’t bear names, only numbers, making all the subjects equivalent, at the same time different from one another, thus sanctioning the uniqueness of each and every woman.