Punk-RomantikIt’s not easy, these days, to discover “new talent” in the world of Italian photographers interested in architectural space and landscape. In recent decades, indeed, starting from the work of a few selected masters, the Italian “landscape photography” has grown dramatically and in all directions, coming to emerge as a dominant genre. A genre able to extend the breadth and variety of his subjects from an overhead perspective to the abstraction of architectural detail, to the living matter of bodies, faces, eyes of those who dwell in landscape and, at the same time, alter it. But exactly these two extreme interpretations of the idea of landscape – the infinite and the inch of skin – came to my mind when I saw for the first time the work of Ilaria Ferretti. Ilaria, intent on inspecting and interrogating buildings’ corrupt ‘skin’, beside the one sublime and equally troubled of nature, as if these two ‘skins’ were voices of a single oracle, as they should tell us different chapters of the same story. I saw this almost tactile ability in images closed one to each other, nearly pictorial, of saddened Seventies’ plasters. I recognized it in the extended work of research that Ferretti carries out on the theme of quarries. A theme, among other things, particularly appropriate with respect to her interior genius loci and training, given that the author comes from the italian region of Marche. Her black and white portraits of hills and carved, ulcerated, halved mountains allow her, on one hand, to get to look up bravely to the heritage of Giacomelli and his portraing “in sequence” small and large mutations of the visible face of his land. On the other hand, they permit her to develop a more personal and contemporary approach, able to grow a critical and subjective perspective on the relationship between horrible and sublime, between man and his environment. The concept of sublime, observing this work, does not occur by chance. The same Ferretti declares, whenever she can, her passion for a romantic figuration, translated in this case, in an attempt to document at the same time both the “suffering” of nature and the thin aesthetic thrill that surrounds us when we stop to contemplate wounds and amputations . But precisely the coexistence of these two parallel and opposite feelings, no longer summable up in a single aesthetic, makes the romance of Ilaria Ferretti very contemporary. A romance able to map photographically the artificial and brute violation of the terrestrial epidermis with the same close passion with which Ballard describes the lacerated skin and the body injured, amputated and mechanized of the victim of a road accident. Ferretti moves with ease in the contradiction of contemporary aesthetic sensibility, which must suffer honestly and with empathy enviroment’s continuous loss of integrity, but which can not, at the same time, give up to aestheticise this condition. Pippo Ciorra |