12 September, 2020
Maribor

In collaboration with Fotoklub Maribor, the exhibition “Continuo infinito provvisorio” (“Continuing on infinitely temporarily”) by Alessandro Ruzzier will be on show at the Epeka Gallery as part of the Maribor Festival of Photography.

In his description of his photographic and artistic project over several years, Alessandro Ruzzier begins by saying that it “led him to a place where his foot had not yet set foot” (Ruzzier, Continuo infinito provvisorio), using an old and familiar saying that has a monumental, perhaps even a slightly dramatic, effect, no matter when or where it is used. To step where no foot has stepped before, to travel into the unknown, certainly sounds like an adventure with a romantic touch. It is an entry into a world that has hitherto been somehow untouched, but now there are the footprints of a visitor. But it is not only this world that has lost its innocence; the visitor has also been changed by the realisation, by the traces left in him, by the imprint of the experience. Through him, the imprints have passed on to third parties, observers from the outside, virtual visitors, and yet witnesses of what is. The artist is here in the function of return. He is returning from his experience of knowledge and telling a story about it in images. The icons, symbols and imprints of his experience come alive for us through a fictional reality, through absence and figuratively.

Like the other sayings, the one used by Ruzzier conveys a message through metaphor rather than directly. I don’t think anyone imagines that the artist literally stepped on something with his foot. Well, as a photographer, he had to move to take the photographs, but in a literal sense, these were places that were familiar to him. But still, the artist used it to express not only his experience of his own work, but also one of the basic processes of deciphering the photographic image. This is not to say that the message of the metaphor is self-evident and that a literal reading is not possible. In fact, it offers itself, perhaps it is even intrusive. Francois Soulage says that “the achievement of realism is always the result of a great mental effort, whether in science, art or photography. Photography does not give us more information, nor does it offer a closer picture of reality than a cave or cubist painting. On the contrary, by means of this apparent reality which it is supposed to offer, photography actually conceals the mechanisms by which it would become intelligible … To believe that mechanical means are realistic, that they can convey reality, is to be ignorant of the fact that realism, like every other invention of the popular spirit, is relative, historically contingent, and subordinate to the idea that people construct of the world and of themselves” (Soulage, 2008, 78). In a similar way, the reader of the text must also be informed of the convention of this culture, in a sense initiated into it, in order to understand the word for the part of the physical body that allows movement through physical space as a symbol for movement through spiritual space. He must understand that in the chick’s footstep it is not a mere random step, but that the body serves as a tool to knowledge; in the text as a metaphor, in life as a vessel. In Continuo infinito provvisorio, Ruzzier’s work of research and art, Continuing Infinitely Provisional, he clearly understands that he comes to know the universe through images, some of which he recognises in the photographs he takes, knowing that they “carry with them the illusion of truth” (Ruzzier, Continuo infinito provvisorio). The documentary quality of photography, that is, the representation of things as they are, is false, an illusion. Gary Winogrand stated somewhere that he takes photographs to see what a thing looks like, which means that he was aware that a photograph does not carry the thing itself to him, but only its appearance, and that it says perhaps even more about how the thing is photographed than about the thing itself.

Soulage takes this idea further when he argues that “a photograph is not the same as a frozen scene visible to the human eye. Moreover, the observer does not look at a photograph in the same way as he looks at the world. The smell, sound, taste and touch of a photograph are not the same as those of real phenomena. We see differently and we see something else” (Soulage, 2008, 76-77). The body that is real is the body that observes the photograph, but it is also the most abstract and innocent. It is perceptible without physical touch, without fixation in space and time, and only through the poetics of the meanings conveyed in the images. The abstractness of the body is the position, the standpoint from which it is possible to observe the world at all, which also manifests itself in the gaze through abstraction.

The exhibition will be on view from 12 to 26 September 2020.

Entrance is free.