Hasta La Ideas

Dec 21

Davide Tranchina: Big Bang

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by Paolo Ferrarini of Future Concept Lab

In his latest solo exhibition Italian photographer Davide Tranchina presents a cycle of new works that experiments with a different side of photography.

Placing everyday objects on photographic paper, Tranchina scans and enlarges the negative shadows to create his large-scale black-and-white images.

While previous projects like “Safari Metropolitano” and “Natura Morta” aimed to find reproductions of animals and objects in an urban context, Tranchina’s newest work continues to explore reality through the photo medium but from a completely different perspective.

Curator Marianella Paderni writes in her introductory essay, “In them, there is a return to the idea of photography as writing by light, with the rediscovery of its distinctive fascination that gives it a spectral appearance in which reality and unreality combine to become a magic entity.”

These and other visual effects—the fleeting traces of otherworldly presences—play off the black space of the background for images that look familiar yet surreal at the same time. They recall ghost ships, atomic clouds, starry spaces and galaxies located in a remote and mysterious universe.

In the installation constructed for the current exhibition at Nicoletta Rusconi Gallery, the artist also created a sort of stellar space where the spectator can experience the mental reality of a starry night, thanks to an image, a mirror and a totally black environment.

“By observing objects with their possibility of changing character and context quite apart from their real referent, writes Paderni, Tranchina undertakes, in this work, a reflection on the concepts of ‘original’ and ‘copy,’ and the power of abstraction of photography, which, rather than duplicating reality, shows us a new one.”