Davide Barzaghi: LOVERS at Vittoria Art Gallery
“How can there be a memory of the future?” That is the question that opens the essay by art critic Francesco Longo, written for the show of the same name that opened on September 18 in Alassio and developed alongside the exhibition at the Vittoria Art Gallery.
Some images tell us what we see, and then there are images that try to tell us what we feel. That is where the work of Davide Barzaghi begins, a self-taught photographer who has made the image his own language, and for whom this art has become, over time, a way of looking at the world and, above all, of exploring the world within.
Inside the rooms of the Vittoria Art Gallery, the images of Davide Barzaghi speak to one another in a play of light and shadow that brings out the shapes and the substance of the subjects. A face, a body, a presence, a memory, or something we cannot immediately name: they stand for a reality that is not always easy to reproduce. It is in this suspended dimension that the core of the artist’s research lies: telling what has not happened yet, while evoking at the same time something visitors can recognize as a memory.
What emerges are movements, gestures and presences able to take on an intimate, deep, sentimental meaning. Feeling is, in fact, the real protagonist of Barzaghi’s images.
A love that shows itself in movement, but also in the relationships and the pairings between the elements held inside a single photograph. This is not the traditional idea of love as a bond between two people, but rather a wider notion of presence and connection.
The images bring male and female bodies into relation, and with them skin, stone, water and objects, creating constant echoes between shapes, gestures and materials. The elements meet and set themselves against one another, generating a web of visual and symbolic associations in which opposites end up recognizing and completing each other.
LOVERS – Memory of the Future speaks, in the end, of a love that is not possession, but presence; a feeling that lives in memory and in desire, between what has been and what is still to come. Photography that does not simply preserve the past, but tries to give shape to what, one day, we will remember.
