PAOLO VENTURA
L’archivio ritrovato di V.P.
Curated by Luca Panaro
14.12.2013 - 02.03.2014
Palazzo dei Pio, Carpi (Modena)
From December 14 Palazzo dei Pio hosts for the fifth time, after the exhibitions Beppe Lopetrone: moda e celebrità; Olivo Barbieri: opere scelte 1978-2010; Mario Cresci: dentro le cose and Franco Vaccari: in palmo di mano; a significant event dedicated to another artist whose work has shaped the history of contemporary photography: Paolo Ventura’s exhibition L’archivio ritrovato di V.P., curated by Luca Panaro.
The exhibition was made possible through the support of the City of Carpi, the Gruppo Fotografico Grandangolo BFI and Nuovagrafica whose joint efforts consistently pursue the promotion of the Italian masters of photography and the research on photography involved on investigating contemporaneity as well as cultural traditions and territory.
The exhibition is combined with a fine artist’s book featuring essays and texts (in Italian and English) by Luca Panaro and Marco Antonetto. Luca Panaro: Be it true or false it doesn’t matter, from the exhibition’s catalogue: «Combining different technical skills, such as painting, sculpture, early photographic processes and digital manipulations, within the same project he has plenty of leeway to investigate the status of current matters, establishing a privileged connection with the viewer who is led to discover a new culture founded on the acceptance of hybrid images thanks to the sense of bewilderment experienced by continuously shifting languages. By its very existence, this multiple reality encompassing radically different and yet interlaced experiences advances a versatile mode of thinking, and makes the coexistence of true and false easier to accept. Indeed, the understanding of the present is premised on this apparent contradiction.
The necessity to realize a site-specific intervention must be understood from this point of view: it is neither a documentation of Carpi nor of its citizens, but instead the replacement of both past and present with images that offer a new angle on them. Leaving aside the descriptive function that prevailed in the course of history, photography frees itself from several constraints and lets fiction shape our experience of the real, as some philosophers maintain. All this considered, Ventura does not inquire the true and the false, the question is not even raised. Instead, he aims to build a reality which stands beyond our ordinary perception by staging the discovery of a secret room inside Palazzo dei Pio where various items from the mid-19th century were stored. Displayed with accuracy, these objects tell the story of a man (possibly, the photographer himself) whose initials are embroidered on a shirt stained with blood.
A few daguerreotype plates, a pair of men’s shoes and trousers, a ladies’ evening dress (perhaps belonging to the photographer’s wife), a small caliber projectile, a Garibaldi’s army uniform, a top hat, a fabric pouch containing a wooden compass. Besides, ten books, Italian and French manuals on 19th century photographic processes, and a daguerreotype camera dated around 1850. These items speak about an amateur photographer, but mostly they bespeak a man’s passions. Arranged with accuracy, these evidences are like clues, bits and pieces that allow us to reconstruct an affair that yet remains shrouded in mystery. The found daguerreotypes, un- known so far, appear to be the oldest photographs of Carpi. They tell us about photography in that age and about the struggles to make photography on metal as compared to later photography on paper.
Ventura’s silver plates show what could have been seen in real daguerreotypes, provided that they had been preserved or even ever made in Carpi around that period. Then, it is not important that they are fictional if fiction can be understood as future truth. In this way Carpi re- gained not only the archive of an imaginary V.P., but also an original vision of his hometown with dormer windows on the roofs, curtains gathered at the sides of the windows, posters pasted at street corners, and outfits usually worn to the benefit of the photographer’s rigorous eye. All details that were not preserved in photographic images of the city, and yet we can now experience them through fiction.»