Scritto con la luce

The exhibition features works by various artists, created without a traditional camera (without lenses). The title refers to the publication of the same name, edited by Cesare Colombo and published in 1987 by Gruppo 3M Italia/Electa, which traces the history of photography and cinema in Italy up to that time.

The group exhibition celebrates the bicentenary of the first heliography, taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 from the window of his home, titled Point de vue du Gras. Using a pinhole camera obscura, Niépce obtained an image that, for the first time in the history of photography, was permanently fixed. The ten artists in the exhibition present works that highlight the close relationship between photographic material and light. Françoise & Daniel Cartier (CH), Silvio Wolf (IT), and Pietro D'Agostino (IT) exhibit photographic materials (film or paper) modified by light without the photographer's direct control. Luigi Veronesi (I), Max Huber (CH), and Paola and Bruno Di Bello (I) exhibit photograms created using personal and diverse processes, in which the image is born from a random, sometimes casual, control: Paola Di Bello's images, for example, are obtained by making fireflies walk on photographic paper. Finally, Alessandra Calò (I) and Paolo Foletti (CH) present photograms with a recognizable subject decided a priori: Calò's Herbarium and Foletti's women's bodies, respectively.

The exhibition is not intended to be exhaustive, either historically or with respect to the infinite techniques experimented with over the last two hundred years of photography. On the contrary, it aims to offer a selective and personal perspective: a group of authors who, through their works, revisit and update the primary photographic gesture, returning it to its essence of writing with light.

In this way, the exhibition stimulates reflection not only on the meaning and use of photography as a means of expression and language of the visual arts, but also on its still unexplored possibilities.