Time and memory. Entities with an indissoluble bond that Pio Tarantini, a photographer from Salento born in 1950 who transplanted to Milan in the early 1970s, continues to investigate with elegance and patience in a quest that goes beyond the documentary value of photography.
The photographs of the Imago series in the exhibition summarize the reflection on the concept of "dilated time" - fundamental in the author's photographic research path - through the technique of blur: images with a great poetic impact where the human figure, always female, almost evanescent, fluctuates occupying the entire scenic space, both when she moves in a house interior and when the dialogue is directly with nature.
Imaginary narratives where the bodies do not conflict with the wings of the story but remain suspended in total harmony, as if they were dancing. "The human presence is thus charged with a precariousness in stark contrast to the certainties of our perception of reality," Pio Tarantini points out. "The visual transience of the figures seems to want to dilate the perception of time, which can no longer be that crystallized by the fixed image."
The artist's narrative around memory becomes pressing, the time of real history does not correspond with the time of everyone's consciousness. The female figures move with extreme elegance and the time of memory is subtracted from space-time determinations by dilating beyond the margins of the photograph itself.
Pio Tarantini's artistic reflection on the concept of memory and remembrance is completed with the two works Cassettiera#Lettere and Cassettiera#Pellicole, where two old typography drawers become containers of memory: in the first, the spaces where lead characters were stored contain fragments of old envelopes and letters of private correspondence, while in the second, fragments of reduced-pitch films of personal or famous films are kept.
With this double work, it is as if the artist wanted to remind us that the path begun with the photographs in the Imago series find their natural completion in the written word on paper and film.
The physicality of the two chests of drawers - the yellowed, crumpled sheets, the letter envelopes with the 50 lire stamps, plain or express mail, Europe or Italy, the ink, the fragments of film, the pictures of Charlot, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, all neatly framed as if it were possible to rewind the past, to imprison the flow of memories that punctuate the times of narratives, public and private - refers to the author's need to find a dilated time capable of stretching between the past and the future.
