MACRO–Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma – is showing the works of two young Italian artists, Beatrice Pediconi and Roberto De Paolis, who use photography to investigate the fragile, precarious nature of the figures and subjects they capture in their shots. These are presences that acquire a position in space only to the extent that they lose their forms in space itself.
The title suggests the delicate, volatile nature of the works by both Roman-born artists, even though they work quite independently, the sixteen large-format photographic prints of the No Trace project share a similar view of time and space, which is explored in relation to the fleeting presences and bodies that inhabit them. The two projects were already fully-formed, personal, and independent, but came to fruition through hindsight, completing and strengthening each other in a dialogue packed with questions and answers. The impalpable presences of Beatrice’s photography finds substance in Roberto’s characters. The latter appear to be prisoners of enchantment, but they are touched by the vitality of Beatrice’s vibrant figures. The works look at and question each other in a mirror-image play of references and echoes.
In No Trace, photography shows itself as an essential form of artistic expression if we are to fully understand contemporary forms of art. The Museum continues to show works by the youngest generation of artists in Rome, who offer their international training and experience, keeping alive the dialogue between the city and the world.
The principal element in Beatrice Pediconi’s research is water. Her instinctive “paintings” in water are captured at different moments by the camera’s instant eye, which grasps the unconscious transformation of matter. In the series on display at MACRO, the media used are highly refined India inks, which recall the microcosm of birth and its subsequent development. Wispy traces, ill-defined signs, and vague forms come apart in the light and shade, recalling the movement of life itself, in a fleeting, insubstantial world of illusion, precariousness, and constant change. All is uncertain and ambiguous in Pediconi’s works: the viewer is plunged into a never-ending flow of images that tell of time and of the world, of birth and motion, of flow and evolution.
The subjects of Roberto De Paolis’s photographs are suspended between reality and a dream-world dimension. Evanescent, ethereal figures take shape like apparitions in neutral settings or in private spaces, which only indirectly tell us of the stories and identities they reveal. In this carefully studied setting, which is more mental than physical, the individual is multiplied as though showing different but simultaneous moments of time, revealing the loss of a unifying identity and the fragmentation of the various parts of Self, which for an instant come together in the imaginary space of the photograph. Elena, Lucilla, Jasmine, and Dario, who give their names to De Paolis’s works, appear to brush against the surfaces of the images, leaving a precarious, transparent, mobile trace upon them.
De Paolis’s merging of different moments in time, which is obtained by long exposures that create a doubling of the figures, and the embryonal and emotional instability we see in Pediconi’s works, both reveal an attempt to go beyond the transient and the limits that the present and recollections of the past appear to impose on us, making us prisoners.
Beatrice Pediconi (Rome, 1972) lives and works in Rome and New York. She studied in Paris and Rome, where she graduated in Architecture in 1999. Her work spans various media, including photography, painting, and video. From 1996 to 2005 her research focused on architectural photography, but in 2003 she started painting on water, reproducing the image with photography and video. Her works have been shown in solo exhibitions at the Valentina Bonomo gallery in Bari and Rome, and at Photo & Contemporary in Turin. Her latest series, Untitled, is currently on show at the Italian Academy in New York. She has also taken part in a number of group exhibitions, including, in 2008, “Una Storia Privata. Fotografia e arte contemporanea nella collezione Cotroneo” at the Museo Carlo Bilotti in Rome and at PHotoEspaña. In 2009 came “La Fotografia Italiana” at Palazzo Sant’Elia in Palermo (curated by Achille Bonito Oliva). Since 2010 her works have been shown in group exhibitions in museums in the US, including “The Edge of Vision” curated by Lyle Rexer at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona, now on display at the Cornell Fine Art Museum, Winter Park, Florida. In 2008 she won the prize for Best Artist at the 7th Biennial of Experimental Art in St Petersburg. In 2009 she won the Lucid Art Foundation’s artist residency in San Francisco.
Roberto De Paolis (Rome, 1980) lives and works in Rome and New York. From 1999 to 2001 he studied Cinema at the London International Film School. In 2002 he returned to Rome, where he attended Beatrice Bracco’s drama school and started taking an interest in photography. In 2005 he started exhibiting his own photographs and took part in the 5th Festival Internazionale della Fotografia in Rome with an exhibition entitled “Psicoanalisti”. He embarked upon his true artistic career in 2007, when the City of Rome commissioned a large public installation, Light Building, from him, which he created on the façade of Palazzo Sora during the Notte Bianca, the night-long celebration of culture. His photographs were printed on plexiglass, mounted on the windows and back-lit, turning the building into a sort of vast light box in the centre of Rome. Since then Roberto De Paolis has made new installations for PhotoEspana in Madrid, Museo Bilotti in Rome (both for the Cotroneo “Una Storia Privata” Collection), Arte Fiera in Bologna, Casa Zerilli Marimò in New York, and for the Museo di San Servolo in Venice (curated by Raffaele Gavarro). In 2007 he started working with the Oredaria gallery in Rome, where in 2008 he put on his “Qui e mai altrove” solo exhibition. His installations and photographs have been shown in various group exhibitions abroad, including “Magie real” at ArtMbassy in Berlin and “Wildly Different Things: Dublin and New York” at The Observatory in Dublin. In 2009 he made the 15-minute BASSA MAREA, his first short film, which was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 2010. Since 2010 he has been working as a video artist with the British Louis Vuitton magazine, Nowness (www.nowness.com).