Gianmaria De Luca Open Studio

I approached the study of the camera obscura in 2011 after I participated in the project 'Before it's night' by the artist Giorgio Andreotta Calò. The project involved the creation of a giant pinhole camera in Rome’s MAXXI museum, which projected the outside world on to a wall overlooking a large dark pool and subsequently its reflection. The project not only inspired my portrait of the artist inside his creation, but also was pivotal to my own study.

 

The leitmotif that has always guided my artistic research can be found in the relationship between light and shadow, within an imaginary constructed by experiences, studies and the search for another reality.

 

For this reason, during the quarantine period imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, forced to remain at home with my partner, I wanted to try a sum of all my recent experimentation, turning part of our home into a camera obscura in which to enter and create sets and scenes. In the meantime, the collective fears and anxieties being faced by the world during this period left their mark.

 

The resulting images reference dark realities, and characters both grotesque and suffering, and magical and mythical. Furthermore, it seemed to me that the particularity of this new context uncovered or imposed a new style from a conceptual point of view by which I chose to produce unique originals, namely negative prints made on silver gelatin paper.

 

Within these representations I also wanted to tell the intimate reality that I was experiencing with my partner, using her as a model, actress and muse. The images, therefore, are an allegorical representation of the present through constant references to the history of art, to Greek myths and to my latest research on the unconscious and female archetypes.

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