Metropolitana, 2013

Sergio Silvestrini  

Sergio Silvestrini has been a photographer for forty-seven years and from thirty-five he is a professional in the field of documentary. His totally unpublished photographic archive contains thousands of shots taken all over the world: an exceptional material for his stunning experiments that characterize him as a pure conceptual artist beyond the limit of photography.

Where can visual perception arrive? What can one sees? Microscopes and telescopes increase the magnification expanding the space; a camera expands the time. Other instruments allow a holographic, radiographic, thermal, magnetic or infrared vision.

The visual perception is always linked to the space-time unity of the human eye. We see in a given moment and space, when and where the gaze is focused. But it is possible to see more, creating a new space-time unit through a camera travelling fast and orthogonal to the subject, with extremely dilated exposure times. Thus reality coagulates in an image so condensed as to completely dematerializes itself.  

Cobblestones, road signs, bycicle lanes, holes in the asphalt and tire marks sometimes offer absolutely perfect compositions from a formal and chromatic point of view.

On chipped walls, stained with moisture and dripping pipes and gutters, we find a large part of the history of art, from the Flemish to the eighteenth century Vedutists, from Leonardo's nuisance to Schifano's pop, from Constable to Turner, to Friedrich, to Monet.

'I play with double, specularity, appearance, mystification, showing one thing for another […] Double meanings, double figures. Often images turned upside down, distorted, improbable. Reality and duplicates of reality, further duplicated by photographic representation. And I feel excited to do it with a camera, which more than any other medium should show reality for what it is. '