Paola De Pietri

Massimo Carasi, Mantua
Through April 5

Paola De Pietri’s most recent photographs are poetic, melancholy records of commonplace naturescapes, such as a dense flock of birds crossing the sky, or leafy branches rustling in the wind. Working with large-scale images, De Pietri presents the drama of nature in all its facets, seemingly seeking to illustrate a portion of nature that could continue beyond the limits of the framed shot.

Her work is far removed, however, from the importance that postmodernism placed on accurate research and the careful presentation of detail. Enlarged, fragmented, or otherwise, detail is the undisputed protagonist of most photography, film, and cinematography in contemporary visual culture. In fact, Paola De Pietri’s images are not the product of close-up framing, which offers macroscopic precision and the privileging of one part of the image over the whole.

Although it is possible to talk of “stretches of sky” or “sections of woods” when referring to the work of the artist—for example in the piece entitled Dettaglio (Detail)—the concept of fragmentation isn’t resolved in a “hyper-real objective” where detail becomes an end in itself and the onlooker is forced to concentrate on the reality of the object. De Pietri’s works classify and communicate phenomena that broach such a broad spatial and temporal context to be captured by a photographic lens.

The dark cloud of birds—regardless of whether they’re blackbirds or swallows—is a synecdoche essential to the rhetoric of the image, if we are to understand it in its entirety. Furthermore, the traditional procedure implemented by the artist—superimposing two negatives in the same picture—shows an attempt to grasp not only spatial but temporal continuity. In the series of work which depicts tree branches, they seem to be moving and that the photograph, rather than freezing a precise moment in time, aims at expansion of the image and seeks the sequential.




Paola Noé
Translation by Anna Clarkson