This exhibition will represent the First Chapter of what will be an annual programme titled GREY Circus, curated by Alexandra Mazzanti and Valentina Ilardi, the former founder of Dorothy Circus Gallery Rome & London and the latter founder and curator of GREY Magazine, a leading international publication that has strongly influenced fashion photography in the last decade.
What I’ve Seen So Far, presented both at Dorothy Circus Gallery in Rome and in London, is a comprehensive overview of works by the most prominent international photographers, selected for their exceptional talent and imagination. The artists on show are: Billy Kidd, Caitlin Cronenberg, Peppe Tortora, Laurent Chehere, Iness Rychlik, Anka Zhuravleva, Karel Chladek, Arash Radpour, Jesse Herzog, Giuseppe Gradella, Claudia Pasanisi and Mirko Viglino.
The works showcased will highlight the strong bond established between contemporary photography and the visual codes and foundations that the gallery has been supporting over the years. In the last twelve years, Dorothy Circus Gallery has brought on stage mainly artists linked to painting and other traditional techniques and styles. Styles that have, in recent times, become harmoniously intertwined with the realm of photography, thanks to hyper-modern visionary styles, a rediscovered cult of beauty, as well as generational animism aimed at renewing spiritual and exciting themes.
Indeed, as we are witnessing a substantial change in contemporary photography, the exhibition will highlight avant-garde and Figurative Art codes that have always characterised the curatorial line of Dorothy Circus Gallery.
A special attention is dedicated not only to the magnificence of style and technique of the featured artists but also to the concept of seeing through the photographer’s eye, able to capture a fragment of what flashes before his/her eyes and – through a skilful creative process – to transform it into a moment that can last forever.
This denial and privation of time are one of the most fascinating components of photographic art. Through its realism, a photograph is transformed into an eternal moment, drawing on multiple subjects and a philosophical and spiritual imaginary that combines profound and introspective themes to exhibit a story that speaks of humanity and that can somehow persist over time.
In La Prisonnière, Marcel Proust writes ‘The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes’. Similarly, What I’ve Seen So Far will be linked to the concept of discovery through seeing with new eyes. While looking at a painting we are able to play with ours and the artist’s imagination, but with photography, we can directly see through the photographer’s eyes. It is seeing what someone else is seeing and, therefore, seeing with new eyes.
The spectator is transported into an imaginary that is in perfect balance between an inner and outer journey, a journey that starts from the Self and then transmutes into something greater, something that includes observing oneself and observing. In this way, the artists exhibited will tell us stories that are different and intertwined at times, observing each other, and taking us to places that will give complete freedom to our imagination. We, as viewers, imagine with and thanks to diverse figurative scenarios that sometimes will take the form of a human body, with its unique and unreproducible features, while at other times it will be a flower or a kiss or just a haunted house to grant us the freedom to envisage dimensions that we did not believe existed.
The exhibition will celebrate the most diverse and hidden forms of the human soul. We are invited to observe and try to give shape to those sensations, to those movements of the human soul, which often have no physical matter. Love, respect, joy, fear, strength and pain find colours and nuances in a sequence of photographs that offer the most disparate panoramas, accompanying us on this journey.
The 13 selected photographers will each present a series of 2 to 6 artworks, showcasing a unique fragment of reality that is distant from us and, at the same time, parallel to our emotions.
