Massimo Vitali

Arndt & Partner, Berlin
Through March 10

Massimo Vitali creates photographic records of how human beings organize their leisure time at the end of the twentieth century. They show crowded nightclubs and public festivals in parks, overcrowded beaches, or fully booked skiing resorts where run-down citizens seek recreation and entertainment. Blissful, deserted beaches or exotic markets don’t figure in the work of this Italian artist: his large-scale color photographs describe mass-tourism at its peak.

At Arndt & Partner Vitali exhibits his identical-looking, overcrowded Mediterranean beach scenes, which have often been photographed from an elevated viewpoint. On closer examination, the people in the photos can be identified as individuals by their age and appearance: terms such as “closeness” and “distance” become important in the way they are positioned either as individuals or groups. Rimini, Viareggio, Riccione, or Cagliari—all from 1995—don’t communicate the beauty of nature, which is evinced implicitly by means of the stark contrast between the beaches and industrial buildings visible in the background. Instead, they document the merging of work and leisure, of town and country.

And perhaps this is the most important aspect: that it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between the public and private arena. Vitali’s work—which the artist himself sees as contemporary documentary—offers different social components. Thus the “eroticization of social space” could just as well be a theme as the repulsive mass of almost uniform naked bodies; the value of recreation as much as the problems of pollution.

Sometimes Vitali’s socio-critical perspective disappears and is replaced by a formal-aesthetic expression closely related to the lighting effects he applies: the glaring light in some of the photographs blurs the color, and thus distinction between beach and sky. The scenery itself thus becomes as fantastical a daydream as this fascinating form of entertainment.




Miriam Bers