Massimo Vitali – Under This Sun
Curated by Matteo Balduzzi
Photolux Festival
23 november – 15 december 2024
Lucca, Palazzo Ducale, Cortile degli Svizzeri 1
The exhibition presents Massimo Vitali’s work in an unprecedented way through three distinct and complementary nuclei. The heart of the exhibition is a selection of images belonging to the famous beaches series. The photographs mark a time span from 1994 to the present day, telling, along with the aesthetic wonder of the places and the mysterious narratives that develop in the composition, how Italy and Italians have changed. Tattoos and mobile phones, bodies and gestures, costumes, towels, accessories, colours: the essentiality proper to the seaside condition that had already conquered Pasolini allows an infinite number of revealing details of our society to emerge and be compared over the decades. For the first time, a sampling of Vitali’s entire analogue archive is being presented, consisting of 4970 large-format negatives made between 1994 and 2016, which are currently being digitised and published online in their entirety, including the badly exposed plates, those never printed, and the different versions of the same subject. This is an unusual and courageous operation, made possible by the support of a PNRR project, through which the artist shares the inestimable heritage of images and information he has recorded with an ever-growing public of enthusiasts and the curious, as well as researchers and scholars, while at the same time revealing his working methods. The exhibition closes with a limited selection of Massimo Vitali’s best-known works, displayed in their most accomplished and precious version in terms of materials, formats, and assemblages, with that unmistakable aesthetic dimension that has allowed them to become part of private and museum collections all over the world. The images range across different themes and places, suggesting the complexity of Vitali’s entire oeuvre and confirming once again his great attention to the human condition and the extraordinary balance between distance and proximity, attention and rigour, classification and empathy.
The exhibition also marks the 30th anniversary of Vitali’s career, celebrated with the Photolux Award 2024
