Alessandra Cevasco
Winter Trees of the Plains
IL SENTIMENTO DELLA BELLEZZA
Alessandra Cevasco
Winter Trees of the Plains
IL SENTIMENTO DELLA BELLEZZA
Winter Trees of the Plains
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A nature like the Emilia one, like many others already seen several times, assimilated by the Northern ones, which give colour to our country during the long winter; these Alessandra Cevasco pictures express a link with winter in a day just perceived by the dark of a distant twilight. The images recall places of lost pathways, working in the fields, inside a land as precise as, for inner transport, unspecified. Here then, at least for me, the suggestion to see again the course of a rarefied season, deeply rooted there for ever, still and always adolescent in its wild push. Because the power of this almost introvert nature is transmitted by finding a winter order (the vanished snow, like the disappeared footsteps of wild animals, the half circle of passed tractors) establishing with the photographic circumstance a sort of empathic state which never completely can explain why that given possibility made such an intense frequency rise. Alessandra Cevasco became a sentry of a place through the moment of a picture. She defined the summary of a landscape essence as an endless voyage towards a cyclic elsewhere never completely known. I can imagine a wanderer around naked trees, the cold and the photography as a just encrypted data transmission, just like Morse code, throbbing, to cover the dark lands overcast with bad weather. The winter trees crossed by fog, with their branches to the sky, and the dark trees against the background of light, are the expression of a defined action in a sensitive picture. The objectivity in a winter sequence, - in the impulse of a photographic pointillism, like impressionistic sequences, the fog wraps every element of nature and other things (the buildings that emerge like a phantom temple in the middle of the landscape) - releases the certainty of an event like by spontaneous solution. The same place of research of this photographic work (here it's the darkness which is searching the light, a bright from inside among the light of the earth and the foggy atmosphere) is specified toward different perspectives, where the multiple obsessive gazes define the musical beat frequency; and the way Alessandra Cevasco perceives reality in the optic room is explained in a bit chimerical isolation within an evident situation of landscape: the series of framings expose the persistency of the instant,
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inserting the image in another visual hemisphere just removed from reality. This is one of the examples of how the photographic impression, just like during the performance of a musical quartet, manages to catch here an atmosphere in the grey of winter and to compose sounds like tactile, of moving ground, trees and leaves worried by an invisible wind. Andrea Gibellini
Andrea Gibellini (Sassuolo,1965) published three books of poems: Le ossa di Bering, Nce, 1993 (The bones of Bering), La felicità improvvisa, Jaca Book, 2001, Premio Montale, (The Sudden Happines, Montale' award), Le regole del viaggio, Effiege, 2016 (The rules of travel). He edited an issue of the magazine Panta (Bompiani), the book of poem essays “L'elastico emotivo”, Incontri Editor (The Emotional Elastic) and the essay Ricercando Auden, L'Obliquo Editor (Looking for Auden). His poems and essays were released on “Nuovi Argomenti” (New themes), La rivista dei libri (The book magazine), Poetry Review, Oxford Poetry. His poems are translated in English, German, Spanish, Dutch and Sweden.
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(…) the reality-truth, we will never know what it is, we can only seek for it; it wraps on itself and withdraws while offering itself, just like when we observe a photograph. Italo Calvino To whom deals with the visual semiotics, like in my case, “to read” the photos by Alessandra Cevasco could mean to get into that traffic of theoretical obligations which often risk the limit of the method, that, in turn, pervades all the inside and all the outside of itself. Hence I will try a possible departure from the most orthodox chiasmi of those sciences willing to explain the “give to see” of the things. I will try a more cautious approach, with the wonder of the doubt, being wary of the cartesian tastes and where the words won't be penumbra over the “senses”. The photographs are restitutions, objects, things. Meaningful signs represented by a complete rectangle: surfaces, where the organization of the senses reached out, for a moment, the pure happening of the world and the things. Everything appears, the reality shows through the dilemma of the sensitive to reach the shape of the image. And when we see all that happening, we are always accompanied by a “sound”, a noise, a voice, which resounds in ourselves. Maybe this is how the landscapes and the photographs, in their silence, “speak”. A photograph always tells about a thing that was there, that was caught in the total and including movement of the clues. Then, transformed in image and resemblance-shape, becomes unseizable. The presence, since that moment, will consist in its absence. The photographer has seen, has watched and then has nominated in a double thread weaving, that seems an enchantment. So, here we have a photograph; a place of mimesis made of esthetic language where the significant and the significances converge. Alessandra Cevasco found herself “going”, she tried that being “the” and “in” the world, she put herself in front of the “truth”: the only and absolute, the one of the nature. She belongs to the truth, as a metacosmic being with the transcending in the conflictual otherness between the sensitivity and the sense.
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She is the landscape herself. A space-time, which offers to contemplate, an interruption in the flow and the rhythm destinated to a spiritual elevation. A sentimental contemplation, a Stimmung looking for “the word beginning�, where the nature is in a silent and auroral depth. Appearances, proximities, distance, duration, meanings, significances, inside and outside: they struggle in an attempt of art, that spasm of the illusion of another world from the one we are watching. Maybe a winter, or a spring, a chopped off stem, a night which leaves for the dawn, a beat of a seed in the ground, a measure of air that runs and goes away. Or a breath that sounds the words in order to suggest a road. Everything speaks as the steam in the sky, like a simple sail in the wind that pushes the affairs of the humid mornings where the meanings and the shapes of the original word arise. And sometimes, in all that void of fullness, it feels a lack. There's no nostalgy, nor the distance, as all that is lacking is there. Danilo Cognigni
Danilo Cognini is a Semiologist of Figurative Languages.
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on a bare branch / a solitary bird / listens to the dream of a tree
All photos were shot in Italy, in the planes between Piemonte and Lombardia, during December 2014, January and December 2015. Š Alessandra Cevasco
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Born in Santa Margherita Ligure, Alessandra Cevasco lives and works in Genoa. The image has always been the medium that allows her to relate to reality in the most profound and contemplative way. She studied painting and etching at the Academy of Fine Arts, in Genoa. The photography, which she approached independently,was initially a way of provoking a greater awareness of the world's beauty, mainly concerned with the observation of nature. Later on, she deepened the thematic aspect of her work, as her images became more formally rigorous. At this point photography became a creative process through which meaning could be constructed, as well as an essential source of relationships, dialogue and self-knowledge. Since 2002, she mainly focuses on b/w photography, and on the manual printing techniques she uses to realize her images. In September 2007, together with Davide Marino, she opened the photo gallery Incantations, in the heart of Genoa's historic centre. Since then, in addition to her activity as an author, she works as a professional photographer, manages the exhibition space and teaches on the photography courses organized by Incantations. Her current poetic ethos is both intimate and metaphorical, increasingly attentive to narrative sequencing and to the dialogue between objects and the space that surrounds them. Main exibitions: 2015 5 JAHRE (collective) - Galerie Edition Camos, Monaco di Baviera, December 2015-January 2016 HOLYDAYS - Biennale d'Arte “Diffusa 2015�, Quiliano (Sv), July 2015 THE SONG OF THE EARTH - MIAfair 2015- Milan Image Art Fair, Milan, April 2015
Winter Trees of the Plains
THE WATERS OF THE LETHE RIVER - Galerie Edition Camos, Monaco di Baviera, May-June 2015 - MIAfair 2015- Milan Image Art Fair, Milan, May 2014 - Biennale d'Arte “Diffusa 2013”, Quiliano (Sv), July 2013 - Kratochville Castle, Southern Bohemia, June-August 2010 - The Art-Hall Gallery of Arts Support Found Gallery, Kiev, June 2010 - Studio Incantations, Genoa, May 2009 TEXTURA LUCIS (a project in collaboration with Davide Marino) - Damascus Museum, Lorsica (Ge), March-May 2014 - The Art-Hall Gallery of Arts Support Found Gallery, Kiev, June 2010 - Studio Incantations, Genoa, May 2009 ACQUAimmaginata - Barrili Villa, Carcare (Sv), November 2013 INTERLUDE - Studio Incantations, Genoa, May 2012 WINGS - “Il Portolano” Library, Camogli (Ge), September 2009 - Studio Incantations, Genoa, May 2008
Pubblications: - THE WATERS OF THE LETHE RIVER – Silvana Editor, 2014 - BLACK & WHITE MAGAZINE (portfolio selection of 2014)
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Texts by
Andrea Gibellini Danilo Cognigni Alessandra Cevasco English translation by
Arseniy Balagura Graphic project and layout
Leonardo Panichelli
Thanks to
Studio Incantations
Editor
studio LightBOX Civitanova Marche (MC) Printing
Marvel - 04/2016
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Art iBook
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002 Alessandra Cevasco - Winter Trees of the Plains
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