These photos are remains. They are waste, offcuts, leftovers.
These photos are the ones rejected by Paolo Sorrentino during the making of the book he created with Jacopo Benassi called Gli aspetti irrilevanti (‘The Irrelevant Aspects’). For the book, Jacopo brought together more than 200 portraits from all over Italy, and Sorrentino selected 23 images from this group of people he knew nothing about in order to invent a short story about each of them from scratch.
A large part of Jacopo’s work is based on portraits, a genre in which he is probably one of the leading Italian artists today. He makes portraits of people continuously, ones that are sometimes grouped together for a show, a book or a fanzine. The same portrait might pop up in different projects, and the groups can at times overlap and intermingle. Some photos might disappear into his archives for years and then come back to light once their moment comes along once more. It’s unbelievable just how many people he has photographed. Many are friends or simply people with a face he found interesting. But he has also taken a huge number of shots of rock stars, actors, famous athletes, businessmen, international freaks and other personalities from a vast range of worlds.
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His corpus of images somehow constitutes a personal Comédie humaine where every single person may appear as a vision in front of us with a real tridimensional presence, each with a different psychological thickness. Making a portrait doesn’t mean simply representing a face. It’s something more, for this face should at least give the idea of having a specific name and surname, and being owned by a persona who might endow it with a specific meaning, tell or allude to a story, and in some cases influence (perhaps only imperceptibly) the time in history we are living through. And the people Jacopo makes portraits of, like in this case, become real characters. That’s also why I think he has collaborated for such a long time with a director like Paolo Sorrentino. It’s interesting how this collaboration between an artist and a movie director draws on a tradition that produced so many great results in Italy in the past, yet one which today is all but lost.
Informazioni
Data: da Ven 2 Mar 2018 a Mer 11 Apr 2018
Orario: Alle 20:00
Organizzato da : ICI London
Ingresso : Libero
Luogo:ICI London
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