WITHOUT COLOR

At the end of the exhi­bi­tion year, the Gal­lery for Con­tem­porary Pho­to­gra­phy is devo­ting a stu­dio exhi­bi­tion to black and white pho­to­gra­phy or image motifs. The ten selec­ted works by seven artists not only com­bine a con­scious exami­na­tion of the aes­the­tic pos­si­bi­li­ties of a color scale redu­ced to gray values, but also the inclu­sion of the tech­ni­cal requi­re­ments of the black and white pro­cess in the image design.

The genre of por­trait pho­to­gra­phy is rep­re­sen­ted by Alex­an­der Maged­ler, Nobuyuki Tagu­chi and Josef Karl. Maged­ler con­cen­tra­tes on the con­tras­ting eyes and hair of the model Vin­cent Litt­le­hat stan­ding behind a pane of glass, while the rest of the body is over­laid by the reflec­tion of the pane. The same model sta­ges Tagu­chi in the style of Japa­nese hen­tai or loli­con anime, with the fabric pat­terns of kimono, obi and woo­len blan­ket for­ming an orna­men­tal con­ti­nuum, in con­trast to which the model’s head and arms are for­mally deli­mited. Josef Karl’s works from the hIDe series appear pro­vo­ca­tive at first, as the nude models osten­ta­tiously dis­play their phy­si­ca­lity, but their some­ti­mes exis­ten­tial life expe­ri­en­ces and fates are nar­ra­ted and indi­vi­dua­li­zed by adding color accents and ID cards.
The Ame­ri­can pain­ter and pho­to­gra­pher Alexa Meade paints back­grounds, objects and people with acrylic paint in a way that the camera eye belie­ves to per­ceive a two-dimensional sur­face in the form of a cohe­rent pic­to­rial space instead of a three-dimensional space. Since her begin­nings, sub­jects desi­gned in black and white have played an import­ant role in her oeu­vre. Her street art motifs are some­ti­mes remi­nis­cent of Banksy’s sten­cil graf­fiti, but there are also sty­listic links to Keith Haring. In “Line Up”, the artist adds glass panes as addi­tio­nal image lay­ers, on which the con­tours of the model are repea­ted with an expres­sive gesture.
The Turin-based pho­to­gra­pher Ugo Ric­ci­ardi trans­forms fami­liar pla­ces into magi­cal visi­ons, in which the dar­k­ness and the moon­light pro­vide the back­ground for mys­te­rious pho­to­graphs. The result is “Nightscapes”, a world that oscil­la­tes bet­ween rea­lity and dream, cha­rac­te­ri­zed by shadows and indif­fe­rent light, in which the sta­ging domi­na­tes. The use of black and white is essen­tial for this, which makes it pos­si­ble to escape the rea­lism of color and to steer the gaze beyond the pure rep­re­sen­ta­tion into a pic­ture rea­lity where space and moment are abso­lute.
The digi­tally crea­ted sub­ject mat­ter of Giu­seppe Lo Schiavo also unfolds almost pain­terly values. Based on René Magritte’s “Le Châ­teau des Pyré­nées”, Lo Schiavo designs a sur­real com­pen­dium of archi­tec­tu­ral cele­bri­ties, each crow­ning a boul­der that hovers over a sea shore. For Lo Schiavo, they show “not a phy­si­cal rea­lity, but rather they illus­trate a ‘uni­verse’ of thoughts, the free­dom of the ima­gi­nary pos­si­bi­li­ties of the unconscious.” Not least with the help of the reduc­tion into black and white, the obvious arti­fi­cia­lity of pain­ting is repla­ced by direct ima­gi­na­tion.
The Sici­lian pho­to­gra­pher Valen­tina Mura­b­ito leads her way back to the begin­nings of pho­to­gra­phy with her tech­ni­que by chan­ging, rewor­king and some­ti­mes defor­ming the expo­sed motifs in the dar­kroom. The often archaic ani­mal and human images of their home­land mutate com­ple­tely into depic­tions of mys­te­rious and dia­bo­li­cal crea­tures.