Text by Bendetta Pomini
Rome, 24 March 2017, 10:23 am. There is a Olimpico Re Sole Bar, on the corner of Piazza Gentile da Fabriano, a few steps away from the Orso Dado, from the Police's Patrol Unit headquarters, Sweet Bakery and Neve di Latte Rom Flaminio. And then there are Eighteen Black Holes, which do not appear on the map but are there. One can hide well enough in Rome. Still. And Calabrese is very interested in words, as well a photographs images. Considerations on language - be it written, oral, photographic, or visual in general - have been an integral part of his work for years, its starting point and also its finish line. Not necessarily the moment in which a thought turns into something else, but the moment in which this something else (word or image) goes out from itself to become other than itself. After years producing photographs images without practically shooting any photos but resorting to the use of a scanner and algorithms, Calabrese goes back to being a flâneur in search of a lost objectivity, meandering through the eighteen streets that have escaped the great all-seeing eye of Google Maps, those eighteen streets that are just like all the others, definitely not must-sees, not at all special, just as the Nine Swimming Pools and Broken Glass by Ed Ruscha were not special.
Calabrese hunts them down, photographs the houses, cars and gates, using - in his own way - the camera par excellence, the view camera, to create a series of images photographs that are completely devoid of any aesthetic research, that show everything without showing anything. He walks, photographs, writes in his own language. He joins and separates, mixes and confuses, reconstructs the relationship between reality and its representation, by drafting a personal glossary and returning once again to reflect on the photographic language he uses. Attempting, romantically, to fill in the gaps of a hyper-connected world and to give substance and matter back to things that seem to have lost them. Supported by Graziadei Studio legale.
Maxxi, Rome, 2019
Maxxi, Rome, 2019
Maxxi, Rome, 2019