Nowadays - Revolving door

Spazio Erasmus Brera, Milan
Through November 17

If the here and now is intended to be the common thread linking the photographs in this exhibition, one gets the impression that, paradoxically, the works on display treat the present as period of time that is undefined and frozen. These photographs lack consequentiality, contingency, or immediacy. Instead, they share a sense of pausing between a “before” and an “after”—of being suspended in the limbo of an imagined time—stuck in the interstitial space of a revolving door, as the show’s subtitle suggests. This is a margin, therefore, that not only serves as a link between one place and another, but as an indefinite point somewhere between the internal and the external.

Armin Linke photographed the Underground mobile walkway that connects the Brazilian Senate building to its Chamber of Congress, using light and depth to enhance the seemingly infinite dimensions of the viewer’s perspective. The architectonic sensibility of Linke’s image can be compared to that in the photographs taken by Olivo Barbieri of the interiors of Palermo’s Courts of Justice (Tribunale). A palpable sense of awaiting judgment seems to materialize as the viewer gazes upon the wide, imposing staircase of the photograph. Adopting the opposite approach altogether, Naoya Hatakeyama fragments the city’s subterranean spaces to render them unreal or transform them into explosions suspended in time.

In contrast to these three artists, who use their cameras to turn real spaces into otherworldly places, Christine Erhard and Hans Op de Beeck create a perceptive ambiguity between their work and its construction. Both make and photograph model structures. Erhard creates lounges and waiting rooms furnished with design objects and walls decorated with a Mondrian-inspired pattern, while Op de Beeck reconstructs a relief model of a rationalist interior, painting it with colors that would seem to have been achieved using photographic filters.

In the stills taken from John Pilson’s video Interregna, the boundary between reality and fiction again becomes blurred and the two overlap ambiguously in the tentative meeting of psychological dimension and physical space. The only hint of possible escape for a white-collar worker trapped within the suffocating confines of an aseptic New York office block is denoted by the words “Exit” written on the emergency escapes. Francesco Jodice, on the other hand, in the close-ups and facial details that he extracts from large group photos, seems to hint that behind the façade of serenity projected by normal middle-class families, disquieting truths and personal dramas are lurking.




Elena Di Raddo