Marco Palmieri: Standing on a Beach
Antonia Jannone presents a new series of photographs by Marco Palmieri entitled Standing on a Beach. The exhibition title is taken from a song line by The Cure who, in turn, mention Albert Camus’s novel “The Stranger”. Thus opens the game of mirrors at the base of this new photographic study.
The series consists of 16 pictures, with carbon pigment print on Hanhemühle cotton paper, in different sizes from 40cm to 75 cm. As typical of the artist they are authentic shots of small objects, placed and photographed by the author. This time, however, Palmieri goes further rebuilding with artistic materials his innermost world, in which ideas are born: the watercolour. The reference looks back unconsciously to Luigi Ghirri’s beaches pictures, where the infinity of the sea backgrounds to sharp and geometrical figures, with clear shadows which draw the space.
The exhibition shots feature: sensations, reflective pauses, instants of suspension, moments of alienation that could happen in different moments of a day. The titles of the works link these pauses with different day hours: 06.40 start, 07.58 will, 15.24 inertia, 18.10 threshold… They refer to 16 hours of the same day or even 16 hours of different potential days in June, a month in which the sunshine is at its highest, beaches are empty and the sea water is still cold. Standing on the Beach / Staring at the Sea: lying on the beach staring at the sea the emotions grow and take over the surrounding. The universe watched from there seems to be indifferent to the human presence, consideration that reflects the gap from the humankind and the world of the main character in Camus’s text.
From the exhibition’s catalogue by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, art critic and the director of GAMeC, Bergamo: […] not portraits but projects, ‘theories-photography’, insofar as architecture is created by the architect but also by the photographer who takes its picture thus giving it an image (Pevsner). However in Palmieri’s works, which are indeed not portraits of pre-existing architecture, one experiences a double kick as they don’t portray an existing subject but they instead create something that doesn’t exist in order to photograph it.
