ARTS/CULTURE EVENTS AND CALENDAR
Subject: MIMESIS: USA Premiere Photography Exhibition by Gaetano Terrana
Opening: Saturday October 17, 2015 at 10:00pm. (New Date)
Details: Original Light Box Exhibit. Original Soundtrack by Aldo Re. Free and Open to the Public, Curators, Art Agents, Galleries and Press.
Location: Firenze Ristorante Italiano, 249 Railroad Ave, Greenwich, CT (Walking distance from Metro North Train Station. Close to I-95.)
Exhibit Duration: October 17 – November 15- 2015
Artist Information: www.gaetanoterrana.com
CONTACTS: Greenwich PR Contact: 203-845-9031 (Jeanine Jackson)
Artist: Gaetano Terrana: 320 1881277 (Florence, Italy) Email: info@gaetanoterrana.com
Venue: Firenze Ristorante Italiano (Greenwich): Tel : 203.817.0919 Dennis Czarneski (GM)
Email : contact@gvfct.com
On Saturday, October 17, beginning at 10:00pm, Gaetano Terrana unveils Mimesis at Firenze Ristorante Italiano, 249 Railroad Ave, Greenwich (Connecticut). This highly collected European artist makes his first US appearance to introduce original light box images created while on location in Serbia. The fragile beauty of two ethereal models reflects the atmosphere of the set – an abandoned space full of suggestive items and materials recovered by Terrana. For the artist, space is not a mere background. It is the core inspiration that Terrana then transforms into visual suggestion through a mimetic process where figure and space are part of a whole and assume the same identity. The artist explains:
The discovery of non-places gives me strong emotions. Places full of such a strong past life rouse my curiosity and make me live that sense of astonishment that belongs to our childhood and is lost with the adult life. In these places, which others have forgotten, I look for items, which tell about forgotten memories and I give them a new life: they are the main characters of my creations.
About the set for Mimesi, Terrana adds:
This attic moved me instantly; I felt a particular energy, something magnetic, and I decided to turn it into the set for Mimesi. Emotion is only the first stage of a process, which takes me to explore the space, evaluate its light, items and materials I can use. In this case I found some old curtains and adapted them to the body of the two girls, a bathtub from the end of the 1800-s, and some old branches, which I used as headdresses. I took advantage of the natural light to get an atmosphere that recalls the origins of photography – in particular the “photography phantom,” a soft and misty light that I produced naturally, without post-production retouch.
For this exhibition, the artist did not retouched his pictures because of an oriented expressive aim and not because he refuses post-production technologies usage:
I am not against the use of those instruments that let us retouch or modify a picture. In the case of Mimesi, the use of technology would have destroyed the poetry I found in that place, which I wanted to eternalize as it appeared to me. For other works, I use these technologies to add emotion to a picture; I want to give it a soul and get it closer to what I want to express.
As in other characteristic works of the artist, Mimesi transforms the human body through paint, canvas, technological and recovered items:
It is a transfiguration that turns the body into a white canvas, where I apply things and materials that are part of our everyday life and the space we live in. We are all surrounded by things we use every day and then change, abandon, substitute, forgetting the value these things have had in our lives. Objects are extensions of ourselves into space. They are parts of us full of life, our lives. By applying them on the human body, I recreate this unity between the human being and the things he himself has created, used and finally abandoned.
The pictures in Mimesis have a color and setting typical of an old movie. They take us into a world that does not exist anymore, into a forgotten and faraway past. It is a leap back in time that contrasts the future world that Terrana tried to imagine several times, a world full of cyber robots and mutant creatures. A vision that cuts the time in two, who we were and who we will be, avoiding or postponing any judgement about the present:
I cannot deny the time I live in and belong to but I find it of little interest and mostly, too conformist. By looking at the past, its ethical and aesthetic values, I can find again the beauty of life, the attention for the production of things, the elegance of manners, and the warmth of human relations. However, in the future I imagine a technology that can invent everything and satisfy every need, turning us into programmed machines. The only thing that no technology can create is a soul – that ineffable spirit which makes us alive and unique. It allows us to communicate with the others with no need of a cybernetic interface. I do not demonize technology and I use it for my work. I just have to love what I reject because what I reject is what I am, and what we are.
Promotional considerations by Simultanea Spazi d’Arte and American Transfers, Florence, Italy. Opening: Saturday, October 17 at the Firenze Ristorante Italiano, 249 Railroad Ave, Greenwich (Connecticut). Ends November 15. Hours: Mon-Sat: 11:30-3pm; 5-10:30pm Sun: 11-3pm
Artist Info: www.gaetanoterrana.com info@gaetanoterrana.com (Florence, Italy)
Firenze Ristorante Italiano: 203.817.0919 Dennis Czarneski (GM) E-mail : contact@gvfct.com
xx Greenwich Girl
