“OCCHIO DORATO SCURA PAZIENZA”

Fabrizio Carotti uses photography in a considered manner which does not prevent him from establishing a comparison with the temporality portrayed. For him, photography starts as an impossible genealogy and then opens up to experiments towards different situations and painting, which is akin to photography among artists in his generation. Thanks to digital technologies, shooting and processing time interact in an ever changing time unit. On the one hand, Carotti’s works are surprisingly marked by the presence of painting showing traces of its texture and old scratches, warm and almost oxidised colours, recalling times which virtually engulfed people and landscapes in a figural embrace. On the other hand, contemporary countenances, swift poses and fleeting movements bring us back to the riverbed of a technique renown for its capacity to grasp the moments lost during our existence. Paradoxically, Carotti’s works not only do they recall painting when he deposits a layer which embraces things and people but also when he applies its stylistic features, mainly in a Caravaggio style. The black light becomes a sort of denial of photography; Roland Barthes’ camera lucida turns dark again, because modern photography, mainly digital, is open to paradigms where the instrument is set aside and does no longer play a pivotal role in revealing the artist’s stance on the world and history of arts. This is important because, unlike in the past, this digital painting can now lean towards the sphere of neumenon. In other words, a technology-bound instrument holds the knowledge linked to the innermost, memory and archetypes, being a universe which has always belonged to culture, also from an anthropological viewpoint. Thus, the word “theatre” perfectly fits in Carotti’s work, theatre as both “teatrum mundi” and “theatre of memory”. The artist perfectly investigates the paradigmatic images of a civilization, namely compassion, sorrow, death, love, temporal suspension, with profound lucidity. Carotti’s photographic painting can summarize what the contemporary figurative art scene overlooks, seeking for something between deep structures and digital miracles. But he also pursues an original perspective of the world which is halfway between past and future, well aware of its origins and which is mostly the expression of a specific standpoint in the world. Thus, the difference between painting and photography is now blurry. It looks like something which recalls something else, an idea which someone pursued and developed but which is gradually turning into memory. What is important to bear in mind is that the XX century destroyed almost everything; therefore, there is nothing else this century and its generations can do but to start over from the pieces scattered and the ruins of meaning.

Valerio Dehò