Prof- Mario Livieri
Pinacoteca Comunale JESI
“He sculpts with a sing in shadow and in light: “it might be Paolo Romani, photo artist, engraving in color. (It was said of Henry Moore: At the borders of light he “softened the stone).”
Romani operates, within the impalpable photo-optical language, in the research of new techniques. Research plus technique, to the point of exasperation; masking the contents of the usual territory of photography, dipping into poetic atmosphere, transfigurations of the real, which is always color. Jesi is there, in his collection: a return to the roots, a revisitation in the key of visual artist; fashion is there, with a signature; portraits and still life; Florence, Venice, are there, fascinating, universal; dance is there, form-movement, hypothesis of another human condition.
Paolo Romani thus lives in the present, drawing with photographic means his own physical- spatial territory in our culture, which he traverses with a so- called language of images; but these origins, in the real and concrete of concrete of the present, which he calls forth with his models, are an essay of history and technique of photography: camera, procedure, invention. Personality, in the furrow of history.
The discoveries of Niepce had to do with printing. Daguerre: the culture of miniature portrait of ivory. Fox Talbot, drawing (Nature draws by itself, without the hand of man ).
Technique seems to exclude poetry, but Romani reaches a level of refinement in which the two aspects coexist. There are photographic artists who assume technique as pure instrument, for the “recording “ of a not entirely casual realty, to be rendered in terms of negative- positive-density of contrast-rapidity, to be fixed and transcribed as forms and rhythms (almost music) almost the research for a different space, with the anxiety of a different cultural dignity to be applied, you might say, to a hidden facet of the artist process.
It is clear that the “beauty of technique “does not come from chance, from same darkroom alchemy, chasing arabesques of free flights of fancy: the technique of production of the image, of photographic handwritings, requires a different reading: there is a model for the research. It might be the refusal of photographic types, of “court” culture: landscape and portrait, nude and silhouette, the group photograph –all prime material of a clearly pictorial matrix. Or perhaps micro or macro photography which are recognized handwritings; truly photographic transcriptions, good for a critical analytic reading –that is, with no caption in words: and yet, for their different contexts, a difference significance of type.
From the production of a portrait to the photography of a landscape (in the typical iconology of the postcard landscape), or to lay out an urban vista like Walker Evans, to analyze architecture such as monuments (utility-age –certainty of eternity); to read from a bird’s –eye view terrestrial space, urban space, anthropized space, life, to be investigated: in the end the problem of photographic work is the analysis of the materials, the problem of photographic handwriting, specifically: how to go about it? And why that way?
The preceding photographic exhibition in Jesi, with L. Formigoni, proposed to some extent a return to the origins of the historic techniques, almost a documentation, rediscovery, of photographic handwritings, the fashions and the culture of their encoding.
With Paolo Romani we can write the title of “Latest Chapter” of his history, the most recent, bathed in present and future in photography. Thus, between the search for the old and research for the new, with A.C. Quintavalle, an answer emerges to the questions, What is handwriting? What is photography? To photograph is not to construct a beautiful image: it is work, it is attention to one’s own moment of work: it is, in synthesis, attention to the work process which leads to the image “which qualifies. We might affirm that for Paolo Romani this work belongs to the materiality of handwriting in the labyrinth of form-color, it is invention and verification; it is research of means (of the medium), investigation, of the evolution of a precise, personalized, secret technique.
Romani comes to Jesi whit an anthology of “beautiful” photographs, to be read with a sense of complexity of the research under- taken, and of the technical solutions proposed: beautiful images, fascinating in a labyrinth (context) of techniques of darkroom manipulation. Some will say that they are not be withheld, sealed in a case for the enjoyment of the few in a group, in a club: the written images are many to live a life in the world in order to show, being shown themselves .
The Exhibition in San Florian follows the ostensible form of the labyrinth, the geometric realization of the design- projection, as in a map, of the dome overhead, of the architectonic sings which enrich , in form – volume – color, ideals of art of a luxurious age: to follow, with a cadenced step, the journey from one photograph to the next, in a succession of themes, it is worth accepting the suggestion of the architect who planned the layout, when the visitor wishes to pause, “from inside the camera” inside the photographer’s work , inside the process of the mysterious ritual, inside the technological magic treated by the hand of an artist experimenter creator.
To enter, and to linger inside to open the lens, the magical threshold for capturing external light- form.
To complete the voyage in the dark, to open it, to be fixed on film which – at this point maybe for you and maybe for every- one – would offer a fixed form, of the shape of the forms called to pose. Paolo Romani at this point requires, photographic handwriting, with the document- sign of his own cultural – experimental territory, with the proven system of image- languages unique for technique and creative expression. Intervention of the Master: a question of emulsions, of indices of refraction of the gelatine, of retouching, of fixer – bath – solution… Who knows what magic?
The secret of an image being born, it is photography but in the coincidence of optical phenomena and physical – chemical phenomena the image of light, the external model captured on the “field” is transformed in elaborated material, treated, recreated in the laboratory. It is fixed. An air of clear poetry is developed, the photograph is art: in Romani’s hands it refuses the role of mere documentation, it dresses up in original visual solutions; it takes on its own life, in perfect clarity, in pleasing visual coherence. You, the visitor to the labyrinth- show, might have taken the measure of such artistic force, expressed in the series of “handwritings” generated from material, manipulation. The photographer artist stopped at that point in which the results by now were evident (or of certain intuition). The artist, for that mysterious phenomenon of the human spirit, “sees” internally the images of his own language and these he delivers, with joy and surprise. All of the arts are equally language: all, intuition – expression. And technique, of a master hand. Labyrinth, and the relevant “clarity “. Art.
