Paola De Pietri highlights here the optical phenomena of nature through the capture, simple and of an almost disconcerting accuracy, of small phenomena such as misty perceptions, drifts of leaves fossilized by the frost, snow melts on volcanic material; the whole of the exhibition forming patches of color, dare we say, in the natural.
Following the first remarkable presentations of Paola De Pietri's work in France, in the context of group exhibitions such as Cosa mentale, Paysage(s) or The New Italian Landscape at the Electra Foundation in 2000, Les filles du calvaire gallery is dedicating a first solo exhibition to the artist with the series presented at Spazio Aperto, which it is offering following the one at the Gallery of Modern Art in Bologna. This exhibition echoes the one at Palais Jacques Coeur in Bourges, which illustrates the commission she carried out for Images au Centre this year.
Born in 1960 in Reggio Emilia, Paola de Pietri is today a major figure in the panorama of Italian photography. In addition to her collaborations with the Venice Biennale and the Tuscia Electa, she gained international recognition in 2000 with two commissions she received as part of the photographic mission Linea di Confine per la Fotografia Contemporanea of the province of Reggio Emilia, in which she collaborated with Walter Niedermayr, Luis Baltz... These missions followed the European convention on landscape, which gave rise to 6 photographic missions, like the Datar in France.
This photographer was undoubtedly selected for the purity of her compositions, which, far from the bucolic or the picturesque, adopt a style corresponding to this declared will of the European convention to "create new representations of the territory to seize a singular moment of its evolution"; will which is anchored in the conviction that the landscape is not an objective reality, but is subsequent to a particular cultural representation. In the case of Paola De Pietri, it is undeniable: her images present unmistakable characteristics that are found throughout her different series.
Thus, we notice at first sight the importance of the temporal dimension in her work, as for example in her series, realized in 2000, where figures that link the landscapes to a so-called particular meridian position and to a so called given time appear, on relatively timeless and "banal" portions of landscape (grass, view of road or water piece...). The set thus releases a false idea of the specific to refer to the problematic and dialectic notion of timelessness of the landscape. In the series 19988, exhibited under the title Dittici, her diptychs pose the advance of characters in space by the juxtaposition of two shots, in a restricted time interval, and according to slightly shifted points of view, thus provoking what Nathalie Leleu calls "echo chambers between a place and the beings who cross it". The beauty of her images is accentuated by the architectural choice - Italian Renaissance cities - and the framing whose purity is reinforced by the limpidity of the almost white light.