We live in strange times, even if every time, being unable to use hindsight, should look strange and uncertain for those who are contemporaries.
These, however, are times in which the certainty of “magnificent and progressive fortunes”, behind which we try to hide collective and individual insecurities and fears, is less evident. Times of doubts, of fake news passed off as gospel, of uncertainty about the future, as it has already happened in other historical moments in the past and will certainly happen again.
My personal recipe for living these situations happily is to try to catch with an oblique glance (and I hope with a pinch of irony), the inconsistencies, the slightly being out of place of things and people, and to render them quietly as a sign of the crumbling of common sense, using the most surrealist of arts, the photography.
The images I present in this first installment mainly show objects, things that carry within them some slight distortion of meaning, some slightly cryptic message, rendered in black and white to emphasize relationships and quotations taken from the vast iconographic heritage of which we are all – more or less- conscious bearers.
I wanted to leave in color only the last one, for an ironic and disconsolate homage: in the past, light used to sculpt the bodies and faces of saints, martyrs, commoners and heroes and filled the dramas on Caravaggio’s canvases with gloom and splendour; now it can only extract from the dark the epiphany of daily bad taste: a giant ice cream cone.
