25/10/2018 @20h
For his first retrospective, Dreamscape, in the spaces of Espronceda Center for Arts and Culture, Barcelona, Vitor Schietti features a series of large works: From the Unreal to the Real, Extended Moments and Impermanent Sculpture, immersive screenings taken from his many travels around the world and captured by the technique of multiple and long exposure. The space is drawn like a geographic map encouraging the viewer to board the trip.
Schietti’s photographic constructions are based on two apparently similar terms, “time” and “duration”, which the author’s gaze cross, dismantle and manipulate in a constant process of complex thought. The photographic image presents itself as the consequence of a long meditation by staging the different mental nuances that have contributed to the perception of reality at a given moment, expanding it in the space. Manipulation is here not digital, yet built with layers and layers of shots, therefore a writing with light.
The exhibition is built as a landscape itself, through the path of inner perception as well as the idea that the viewer will flow into it. Architecture is the limit we need to face in order to give reference to the senses and throughout the show it belongs both to Nature than to Universe. Photography as well as video are here means to open up, they are tools for feelings not descriptions. The image, although sometimes undergoing the constraints of the technique, is here completely restored to the original imaginative and cognitive processes. Schietti’s attempt puts on the same level and in full empathy, author, spectator and environment. The landscape is not interior, but universal and hyperreal. The inside and the outside speak, and in front of us. Dreamscape suggests an ancient, never solved discovery: reality perhaps exists only in our perception.
Valentina Casacchia
selected images from the exhibition:
About the Curator:
Valentina Casacchia is an art historian and independent curator based in Milan. She obtained her Master’s degree in History of Contemporary Art in Rome, before spending over one year studying at the EHESS in Paris. Between 2005 and 2011 she worked in New York in several institutions (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Jersey City Museum, Freight + Volume Gallery) and for private collections, especially the Gregory Callimanopulos Collection. She is currently the Regional Director of the Mutual Art / APT Collection in Europe. In addition she is the artistic director of The Knack Studio in Milan.
