Lia Choen’s article published in the Italian-Swiss Art and Culture magazine iNews talks about my exhibition! It is a great honor to see my name on the cover, where the much more illustrious one of Zeng Yi stands out, a luminary of contemporary Chinese photography:
The article:
“A journey between past and future is what Piera Fatibene, an emerging photographer in the Italian visual arts panorama, proposed with her first solo photography exhibition. The temporary exhibition, entitled: “Painting the past. Restoration and photographic coloring in the digital age” was held in the ancient village of Orsara di Puglia from 3 to 13 August.
A work that has its roots in the past, in the historical research of ancient dry gelatin photographic plates, but looks to the future, developing and restoring them with modern digital techniques and finally artistically processing them through digital coloring.
The past comes to life precisely through the skilful use of colour, applied in soft but decisive brushstrokes, choosing the chromatic range naturally available in the nineteenth-century palettes from which the images, strictly in black and white, come. The coloring technique used is inspired by the more ancient and rudimentary one of Autochrome, invented by the Lumiére brothers at the beginning of the 20th century.
Family portraits, wedding scenes, hunting trips, moments of shared life. These are the themes chosen to tell a historical moment, between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, an era in which poverty and nobility meet and never merge.
And so a hunter and his rifle are accompanied by a scene worthy of the best Manet, in which ladies with delightful hats, umbrellas and embroidered lace are accompanied by men elegantly dressed in tailcoats and bowler hats, distractedly supported by the inevitable cane. Impertinent children pose in front of a painted backdrop and apparently tame dogs are portrayed on straw chairs. Elderly women with messy hair contrast with young girls with a commoner look. Color highlights what black and white hides. It is a world that no longer exists, but which through artistic coloring we perceive as closer to us: it is the empathy of art that manifests itself.
The surprises on display do not end here, because through the use of artificial intelligence techniques, these characters immortalized in an endless moment, come back to life as if by magic. We see them projected on the wall, smiling and winking at the unaware spectator, who incredulously smiles back and does not spare a tear of emotion, in a silent dialogue that Charlie Chaplin’s cinema would, in the same years, make famous for eternity. ”
