Italo Calvino, "The light-years" in CosmicomicsOne night I was, as usual, observing the sky with my telescope. I noticed that a sign was hanging from a galaxy a hundred million light-years away. On it was written: I SAW YOU. I made a quick calculation: the galaxy’s light had taken a hundred million years to reach me, and since they saw up there what was taking place here a hundred million years later, the moment when they had seen me must date back two hundred million years. […] exactly two hundred million years before, not a day more nore a day less, something had happened to me that I had always tried to hide.
Ti ho visto (I Saw You) is Massimo Vitali’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.
Born in 1944, Vitali receives his first camera as a gift at the age of 12. He starts his career as a photo reporter and continues as a Director of Photography in the film industry. In the early 1990s, he focuses on large formats and “staged” images that do not seek the “decisive moment” but take shape from prolonged waiting periods and an analytical, rational look.
In summer 1994, Vitali takes his first photograph on the beach in Marina di Pietrasanta. This marks the beginning of a successful series, which over the decades has consolidated him as one of the leading photographers on the international scene.
All the elements that will characterize Vitali’s modus operandi in the years to come are in that picture already: the camera tripod – that essentially is the elevated platform on which the artist is standing – is in the water in front of the shoreline, raised above the coast by 5-6 metres. The large-format camera – the only one he had left after his equipment was stolen – allows him to record every single detail. A theatrical piece is staged by unwitting actors, immortalized in an endless number of small episodes.
The artist is moved by a sociological intent and a voyeuristic spirit. He identifies the beach as the privileged place to draft a socio-anthropological manual of Italian identity. The frontal view and the elevated position – the so-called “prince’s point of view” – allow him to capture wide landscape views as well as to delve into the intimacy of human interactions. After hours of patient observation, Vitali chooses the moment in which nothing decisive happens, but multiple micro-stories converge. The cold, whitish light freezes people, things, and places in an immovable space and time. The result is a merciless portrait of everyday life in which the natural element, the public sphere, and the private dimension are intertwined in a crystallized temporal suspension.
Although Vitali’s coasts are noisy and colourful puzzles of bathers, swimsuits, deckchairs, and sun loungers, the resulting image reveals his active awareness of art history: the descriptive and meticulous realism of the Flemish “ars nova”; the Renaissance perspective; the panoramic scenes of the eighteenth-century landscape painters; as well as some classic iconographies of Italian and European painting, such as the image of the “bather” and the “diver.”
The photographer-director’s attentive eye identifies in the crowd the modern version of these recognisable figures. Men and women of our time – pale, tanned, tattooed, isolated, or gathered in small groups – are captured with their ordinary bodies whilst unwittingly enjoying their free time in awkward positions, stripping themselves of the daily working life and laying bare. Behind the apparent banality of these scenes lies contemporary society’s behavioural phenomenology along with its evolution over time.
Vitali’s beaches are often urbanized (Viareggio, Catania) or industrialized coasts, such as Rosignano Solvey, a small town in the province of Livorno, Tuscany. The town appears for the first time in Vitali’s photographs in 1995 (Rosignano Fins). In the foreground are the usual bathers, whilst in the background is the Solvay chemical factory, responsible for pouring sodium bicarbonate and bleaching agents in the environment: this phenomenon has resulted in creating the well-known opalescent waters and white beaches of Rosignano. Vitali returned to the same coast multiple times: in the early 2000s as well as in the summer of 2020, when the artist embarked on a national tour to observe the lifestyle of Italians after three months of lockdown. In these last shots of Rosignano, the theme of environmental pollution is replaced by sociological considerations, such as the beach as a place for social inclusion and the evolution of multiculturalism over the years.
Among other photographs taken in 2020, the first images captured on the coasts near his place (Foce del Serchio Mirage and Marina di Massa capannina bianca – Vogue hope) are far from the exuberant vitality of the previous gatherings of holidaymakers. The desire for freedom mixes with the spectre of a new closure. Along the shoreline a few people timidly move or sunbathe in small and well-distanced groups. The natural landscape acquires airiness despite the minute geometries of the bodies; a wise measure regulates the composition and creates balance between sky, sea, earth, and people.
The exhibition opens with the first photograph of 1994, which is directly related to the most recent shots. Covering three decades of activity, the works on display range from historical (Viareggio Red Fins, 1995) and iconic photographs (Carcavelos Pier Paddle, 2016) to urban landscapes and natural, untouched sceneries (Ponta dos Mosteiros Dark, 2018).
The natural element acts as a counterpart to the universal human theatre and directs the narrative composition in works such as Desiata Shoe (2017) or Firiplaka Red Yellow Diptych (2011), where the monumental and pictorial immensity of the red-yellow rock dominates the scene. Vitali observes it from the water and investigates its roughness and chromatic variations. The barely distinguishable, accidental human silhouettes emphasize nature’s majesty. The human figure entirely disappears in even more radical works, such as Lençois Achrome (2012). In this photographic “achrome” –resonating with Piero Manzoni’s homonymous work – the symphony of whites and blues remains intact and uninhabited, suspended in an indefinite time.
In Vitali’s work, gatherings and crowds alternate with empty spaces, solitudes follow multitudes, becoming the raw material to be shaped by the artist. His gaze creates stories, elaborates them, observes them, records them, eventually sharing his voyeuristic gaze with the viewer: the privilege of seeing without being seen.
