Gioberto Noro: Aperture

At Alberto Peola Art Gallery the artistic duo Gioberto Noro, urged by a cognitive drive in the realization of the work of art, displays an intent to know reality by overcoming the material limits of photography. In this respect, the camera is no longer a mere technical device, but a means to investigate the world and, thus, the Self.

In “Aperture”, the ‘split Self’ recombines in a perfect union – en to pan (“one is the all”) – in which female and male polarity (coniunctio oppositorum) is replaced by a complementary relationship, a perfect symmetry of cosmic principles that produces a balanced gender union. In Sergio Gioberto and Marilena Noro’s Rebis, a firm composure and androgyny transpire from the treatment of images and the ‘individuation’ (individuus, undivided) of the elements that belong to a photographic universe which cannot exist outside reality. The microcosm in the photograph is a replica on a small scale of the macrocosm, a sort of a mise en abyme in which the individual reiterates the universe.

Gioberto Noro’s poetic investigation, based on the examination of the structure of matter and, more specifically, the structure of light, searches the space like a land-surveyor, eventually producing the series Maps. ‘Shadowy’ figures, whose perceptual dimension of space is defined by the light that, flowing across the space, outlines and shapes the visible forms which have been studied and analysed closely to keep the shadow in check. Over the centuries, maps have been a tool used to study and know the surrounding land, a tool that subsequently served the purpose of dominating nature or the native communities.

In Gioberto Noro’s art, the ambivalence of cartography as an instrument of power as well as of self-determination and knowledge is no longer there. Rather, it has become the energetic expression of the erratic thought of these artists, who, submerged in nature in their search for reality, perceive its shadowy flow. The translation of perceived reality into a visual 1:1 image is the metaphorical summa of their intuitive knowledge of the outside world, one in which the images are the ultimate device to understand the interplay between light and shade as an infinite series of projections of outlines that it defines.