Alessandro Vicario

Awareness, dedication, a conviction in the value of investigation. These qualities, increasingly rare today, belong to a photographer capable of combining Mediterranean inventiveness with German rigour.

“Berlin. An afternoon in March on Bernauer Strasse. I wanted to focus my attention on the people passing in front of the remains of the Wall. I was interested in capturing the contrast between the movement of everyday life and the stillness of this concrete barrier.”

Alessandro Vicario

Methodical to excess and endowed with a strong character. None of his expressive investigations could have come into being without these qualities. Weeks of work, reflection and constant discussion: this is the only way to reach, with conviction, the end of a process of exploration and analysis. Alessandro Vicario demands a great deal, first and foremost of himself, but also of those who work alongside him, whether printer, curator or gallery owner. Nothing is left to chance, and his method has the character of an exploration that is never approximate, never frivolous. A close look at the large prints, emblems of his identity as a photographer, reveals how the photographic work seeks to go beyond appearances and bring to light those elements of daily life that help shape identity and memory. One selection after another, one framing after another, photography belongs to a mission to survey space and a universe dense with clues and meanings.

The Berlin Wall

The German capital was the setting for his project Along the Wall. Berlin 2009. There, Alessandro Vicario focused on the people passing in front of the Wall, the symbol of division between East and West. “I wanted to represent,” the artist explains, “the process of becoming, the mutability of life before the sharply defined stillness of these historical remains, at least the short stretches that still survive.” He continues: “The Wall remained in focus in the background, while in the foreground people passed before it, blurred, evanescent, somehow elusive.” Exhibited the following year at Fondazione Mudima in Milan, the images offered the public the value of an investigation intended to reveal the city’s momentary presences. Attention centred on passage, rhythms, passing faces and the intermingling of identities. This year, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of German reunification, the artist and Dorino Iemmi, artistic director of Galleria Ostrakon in Milan, decided to present it in a new arrangement. The photographic narrative is joined by the video installation Raw Sequence.

Domestic Fragments between Memory and Oblivion

What interests the artist in this photographic project is the time that accumulates on domestic walls and within us. Alessandro Vicario apprehends the intangible manifestations of experience by recovering the tangible traces of life: a photographic representation that transfigures and turns into signs the days lived, remembered and forgotten. The images that make up the investigation aspire to be faithful reproductions of the portions of the world they represent. The artist worked with a large-format camera, a Linhof Technikardan belonging to his father, also a photographer: an instrument that guarantees an excellent rendering of detail. It all began one day when he returned to his grandmother’s home a few weeks after her death.

A View of the World

In Orizzonti, a project begun in 2006 and still in progress, it is clear how the “ascetic concentration of his gaze,” as Gigliola Foschi stresses in her critical introduction to his solo presentation at MIA Fair 2011, “does not reduce the world to a cold formal composition”. Facing the scene and capturing the line that separates sea from sky, Alessandro Vicario explores the two halves of the world. The place and moment of observation are recorded as the horizon presents itself to the gaze in all its variations. “With Orizzonti I wanted to explore the theme of human aspiration, beyond the concreteness of everyday life,” the artist explains. “It is the sign of an aspiration towards the infinite. The image evokes a tension that is in some way dramatic, even tragic, and will never be resolved, because it expresses what is unattainable and elusive.” The result of this “ascetic concentration of the gaze,” Gigliola Foschi continues, “does not reduce the world to a cold formal composition. Quite the opposite: it reveals the unfathomable mystery of the world that silently presents itself to us, and points towards the Invisible, the Infinite looming just beyond it.”

The Last Huts. Abandoned Hamlets in the Stura Valley

The latest investigation is devoted to memory and oblivion. The black-and-white images draw the reader’s attention to nature, huts and small villages in the Valle Stura di Demonte, the Piedmont valley situated between the Maritime Alps and the Cottian Alps. Today largely depopulated, visited by holidaymakers and used for second homes, these semi-abandoned places—factories in the valley bottom have attracted an increasing share of the workforce since the 1950s—belong to the past, far removed from agricultural work and the hardships of daily life. This corner of the world is collected in a jointly produced book, published by Blurb. In dialogue with Alessandro Vicario’s images is the valuable contribution of teacher and writer Roberta Marocco, who selected quotations from Il mondo dei vinti. Testimonianze di vita contadina by the writer and partisan Nuto Revelli, and fragments from the memoirs of the shepherd Angelo Bruno.

A few weeks ago, news emerged of an agreement between the artist and the Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea to establish the Alessandro Vicario collection. Almost two hundred photographic prints and a video installation have been delivered to the museum, directed by Roberta Valtorta.