di Luca Fiore
Olivo Barbieri (Carpi, 1954) belongs to that generation of artists who revolutionised the language of Italian photography in the 1970s and 1980s. Together with fellow travellers such as Ghirri, Guidi, Basilico, Chiaramonte, Cresci and Castella, he started to propose a type of images that distanced themselves from the stereotypical views of the Alinari brothers, the amateurism of amateur circles and the use of black and white. This group of photographers was proposing a new look at the landscape (no more postcards), felt part of the contemporary art world and, often and willingly, produced images in colour (until then considered a technique alien to cultured photography). This is a story that for simplicity’s sake, and perhaps also a little out of laziness, we tend to make coincide with the realisation of the exhibition and book ‘Viaggio in Italia’. The year was 1984. Those artists, over time, became the masters of Italian photography but, if they could be considered a homogeneous group then, today, in perspective, what has followed over the years appears, in terms of motivations and results, much less homogeneous. Among them, Barbieri seemed to be the one who most distanced himself from the alleged dogmas of that season. Yet, from his point of view, it was not a betrayal: ‘Even at the beginning of my career I wanted to achieve what I do now. It’s just that only today do I have the right technical tools. My reference points – apart from William Eggleston – were Man Ray and Andy Warhol, and I never believed in the mystique of American straight photography, according to which photographs are a factual document of reality’. But to understand what he means, we need to go in order.
Barbieri held his first exhibition in 1978 at the Galleria Civica in Modena. He exhibited a series of colour images taken in an abandoned pinball factory. These are mainly close-up photographs of the illustrations with which the games were decorated. Pin-ups, superheroes, science fiction scenes, Indians and cowboys… These are images of images. Fragments of a pop imaginary. Something between Walker Evans and Mimmo Rotella. At the same time, the artist from Carpi travels the territory around his home, photographing the urban landscape of the province. Bars, shops, small squares, young and old people. But Barbieri also has another predilection: nocturnes. “I had in mind certain scenes from ‘Apocalypse Now’ and the urban visions of ‘Blade Runner’. In photography, the city at night had already been depicted, even by greats like Brassaï, but hardly anyone had done it using colour,” the artist explains. They are shot with very long exposures, fixing the camera on the tripod and overexposing the brightest areas, which are almost burnt out in print. Unexpected colour tones, produced by different qualities of artificial light, are imprinted on the film. Skies of an unreal purple. Acid blues and greens. The white and pink streaks of car headlights. The movement of the moon and stars piercing the dark sky. The beam of light rising from the oculus of the Pantheon piercing the sky of Rome.
Even when Barbieri landed in China for the first time in 1989, with the curiosity to get to know the shape of the cities in that ‘new world’, night scenes remained one of his great interests. But it is above all the possibility of comparing similar and distant realities that moves him. “The great thing about photography is that it allows you to see distant realities side by side. You can put five photos of cities on different continents on the same table to see the differences. Images are fundamental for comparing thoughts. Wittgenstein himself was obsessed with them. And Aby Warburg does exactly that: he associates images and compares them to try to understand’. In his books, he often juxtaposes photos of the same subject taken by day and by night. Or he surprises with similar forms on distant continents: a bridge on the Navigli in Milan and one in the Chinese province of Hunan; the Tower of Pisa and a building in Osaka, Japan.
But it is at the turn of the millennium that Barbieri begins to pursue increasingly experimental paths. The first technique he embraces is that of selective focus. That is, he began to photograph by focusing on only part of the image, regardless of how far the subject was from the lens. It is a technique that exploits the technical features of the view camera, the machine used in architectural photography, which is gives the possibility of changing the position of the photographic plate with respect to the lens. “In itself it is a technical error, but I have exploited it because it allows me to indicate which way the image should be read and, therefore, suggest an interpretation”. Among the most successful examples is the pair of photographs taken of Caravaggio’s Incredulity of St Thomas. The framing is the same, the distance of the lens from the work is also the same, but in the first one only the saint’s wrinkled forehead is in focus, in the second one only the finger entering Christ’s wound is sharp. “In the first shot you focus on thought and doubt, in the second on the verification of that doubt,” Barbieri explains. It is a language that the artist begins to use to photograph landscapes, buildings, urban contexts. “The human gaze is always in focus but, psychologically, we focus on this or that detail, leaving out what interests us less”. In this sense, for Barbieri, his is a type of photography that, while distancing itself from the supposedly faithful reproduction of the object, respects the common experience of vision. “A side effect of this type of photography is that cities appear as if they were models. They appear as avatars of themselves. So I thought it would be interesting to take aerial shots of urban centres’. Thus was born the ‘Site Specific_’ project, which, for a decade until 2013, led Barbieri to portray major cities around the world in this way.
Over the years, the idea of arbitrarily selecting the point of interest of the image has been declined in other ways, made possible by digital technology: partial desaturation, the out-of-frame of geometric subjects present in the frame, the filling of geometric shapes present in the frame, the coexistence of positive and negative in the same image. The results are alienating. Formalist abstractionism applied to photography. Even if the starting point is a shot of a real subject. Nothing is invented about the shapes we see in the image. He explains: ‘It is a way for me to ask new questions. What is this mountain? Why is this building there? Is it worth preserving?”
After the furore of these experiments, in recent years Barbieri has felt the need to return to the origins of his photography. He has done so with a book entitled ‘Il disegno dell’acqua’ (The Drawing of Water) produced for the Fondazione Banca Agricola Mantovana. It is a journey in which the artist tries to question the relationships between the natural landscape and the ‘artistic landscape’ of the city of Mantua, using water as a reacting element. The book alternates shots of interiors – the Bridal Chamber, the Hall of the Giants in Palazzo Tè, real or drawn labyrinths, inscriptions, frescoes – and shots of exteriors – the paper mill designed by Pier Luigi Nervi, the pontoon bridge in Torre dell’Oglio, the lotus flowers floating in the river water. Correspondences, associations, suggestions, references and memories of readings. Night and day photographs, artificial and natural illuminations. The artist reproposes his ‘workhorses’ and puts them at the service of new questions. Giulio Romano’s giants are grappling with an earthquake, but also with a flood. Water, then, is what holds paper production together (it takes a lot of it in the industrial process) and lotus flowers, which were introduced in these areas with the utopian intention that they would solve the problem of food shortages. The photographs, the stories they carry, the short circuits they generate if you approach them. But also what they produce in the thoughts and souls of those who look at them. Barbieri, who has dedicated his entire life to photography, still cannot explain why certain images strike us and others do not. What do we look for in them? Of one thing he is certain: memory is made of images and reality is made of images. We do not know without images.
Luca Fiore | Writing on Contemporary Art and Photography 