The Phair 2022
27 May 2022
Fragments. Gianfranco Chiavacci - Sharon Formichella. The Die Mauer Arte Contemporanea gallery proposes to The Phair an unprecedented confrontation between two artists who, in different times and in different ways, have both measured themselves with the shattering of reality. Details, fragments, residues are taken from the flow of the time and fixed on photographic supports by Gianfranco Chiavacci and Sharon Formichella; one making use of a rigorous binary system, borrowed from the logic of what we now call personal computers, the other turning a dreamlike gaze on shreds of a disjointed and fluctuating world.Formichella's inquisitive, almost ravenous approach contrasts with a more disciplined gaze, aimed at analytically breaking down reality and reassembling it only later, through a highly elaborate post-production phase with an exquisitely handcrafted flavor. Chiavacci anticipates the expressive possibilities offered by the digital, formulating an analog language whose grammar is made up of collages, solarizations, overexposures and daring manipulations. The artist's surgical eye explores the real, investigates the obscure mechanisms that regulate it, sheds all aesthetic ambitions, without however renouncing a certain dose of irony, mixed with an unmistakable Dada skepticism.Formichella alludes without showing, suggests without revealing. Very claustrophobic close-ups, overlaps, sharp and merciless cuts immortalize gestures suspended between dream and eroticism. The artist understands the photographic medium as a possible expression of herself, as an urgency that pushes her to linger in the detail, in which she is stopped forever a inner motion. If for Formichella photography represents an introspective method to recognize oneself, for Chiavacci it embodies one of the methods of analysis of a world consciously and voluntarily reduced to calculation, from which it is however possible to sarcastically distance oneself. The artistic expression consists in what remains of this process, in the fragment.Mattia Lapperier
