Venezia Immagine

Ikona Photo Gallery hosts Venezia Immagine, a photo exhibition with works by John Batho and Franco Fontana, two of the finest photographers working in colour in Venice.

“I feel a deep attachment to Venice, and for this reason I often stay in this town. The city occupies a special place in my thoughts, just to mention a place to recreate mentally all perspectives. Venice is a theatre in which I situate because the spectacle is everywhere, the walls, the water, the soil are impressive buildings where take place the un-figuration of time, of a cumulative and wrapping time.
What kind of Venice offers itself to representation? The images are so numerous to use up sometimes the real Venice: it seems to have sawn it before have been there. To resume, my idea of the Venetian view and avoid common places of the iconography of Venice, I am interested in discrete aspects of the city, the atmospheres that compose his particular genius.
I chose surfaces and then I add them the strong impact reflections and textures, and superimpose what is away to what is close to subvert the logic of plans and distances.
Touching the ephemeral and the lasting, these pictures express an intimate Venice, between reality and dream, close to images produced in the mind. These views are a confirmation of the passion I feel for the singularity and curious beauty of Venice.”
John Batho, november 2007.

“Fontana’s photographic eye ultimately tends to seize the artifice of historic Venice, the idea of a story built on the water. Venice, therefore, is a continuous theater that stages fathers’ decision through an urban representation that finds their scenes in the palaces’  facades and in the calli, in the beams of light channelled between buildings, in liquids and unclean pathways of the canals. Fontana capture photographically this condition by a wise use of lights and shadows, solarization of the facades and sudden light contractions.”
Achille Bonito Oliva, Mexican Fountain, “Attendance Blinds”, Mongolian Rossi Publisher, 1980.