Critical texts, France, Departement de Ville-de-Paris, Paris, 02 March 2009
Brusamolino’s emotive photographs lead the viewer on a sensual and spiritual journey through the corridors of San Marco in Florence.Through his perspectival lens we are hurled into a void at the centre of a spatial kaleidoscope; a seduction elicited by echoes of architectural curves. But for a moment, let’s forget about monks and stark. Let us set aside the architecture, and pause with him, to gaze at these faces, these bodies in agony, whose lived expressions are imprinted upon lime, a surface support for all of our projections and fantasies of beatitude.
Brusamolino’s imagination engages the viewer with a visual simplicity, beyond his delicate traits of evanescent light and the bright gleam of blood, to times past and the timeless black and white. While his sensuous portrayal adds a softness of spiritual purity, we also experience a strange and tactile encounter between lime and flesh. Now the forbidden correspondence of a masculine universe inspires new fantasies, palpable and disturbing, precisely because they arise here at San Marco, in the place of the non body, between elegance and references to the history of art.
Presented in distinctive black wooden frames, the works are appropriately contained within a series of small white rooms, as in the dormitory cells of San Marco, Florence. In contrast to the absorbant black from without, the light emanating from within the frames may be interpreted as a return to the sacred, while at the same time connoting an element of fetishism, or a wink of complicity at Fra Angelico, one that visually refers to his manner of emphasis upon an absolute presence, or with the unfolding of time...an actual absence.
Alberto Brusamolino, Celle del Dormitorio: The frescoes by Angelico at San Marco in Florence, gallery Press Release, Whitecross Gallery, London, may 2007
Brusamolino’s imagination engages the viewer with a visual simplicity, beyond his delicate traits of evanescent light and the bright gleam of blood, to times past and the timeless black and white. While his sensuous portrayal adds a softness of spiritual purity, we also experience a strange and tactile encounter between lime and flesh. Now the forbidden correspondence of a masculine universe inspires new fantasies, palpable and disturbing, precisely because they arise here at San Marco, in the place of the non body, between elegance and references to the history of art.
Presented in distinctive black wooden frames, the works are appropriately contained within a series of small white rooms, as in the dormitory cells of San Marco, Florence. In contrast to the absorbant black from without, the light emanating from within the frames may be interpreted as a return to the sacred, while at the same time connoting an element of fetishism, or a wink of complicity at Fra Angelico, one that visually refers to his manner of emphasis upon an absolute presence, or with the unfolding of time...an actual absence.
Alberto Brusamolino, Celle del Dormitorio: The frescoes by Angelico at San Marco in Florence, gallery Press Release, Whitecross Gallery, London, may 2007
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