(9 November, 2016) A new opportunity to view contemporary Italian art in Lisbon in the context of a series of exhibitions organised by the Italian Cultural Institute. The exhibition “Paolo Di Bello. Fotografie e video” will be inaugurated on November 10 curated by Raffaella Perna. This photographic and video solo exhibition displays a selection of twenty photographic works pertaining to the series “Le lucciole e Fuoricampo” (fireflies and the countryside), realised at the end of the 1980s and the second half of th 1990s. The surface of the photographs is impressed by light emitted from 25 fireflies collected in the countryside by the artist and transported in a darkroom and left to walk on the black and white photographic film sheets. The series recalls diffused off-camera experimentations in Italian photographic research in the 1960s in which the image, as seen in frames from the 1910s and 1920s, forms thanks to the direct contact between reality and a sensitive surface. The artist’s interest in socio-political aspects emerges in more direct way in her “Fuoricampo” series realised in 1997 in Naples, her native town, after a commission by the City of Naples. Her work in this series is about reality in urban suburbs, a dear subject to Italian photography of the 1980s and 1990s. Although different in form, both photographic series show some crucial elements of the process of photography. In particular, the interest towards the tradition of the avant-garde and the European neo-avantgarde, the introduction of risk in the photographic process, the decision to limit the artistic intervention for the enigmatic aspects present in reality itself. The artists will be present for the inauguration of the exhibition which will remain open until December 16. (Red)
