As part of the BEAUTY artist residency, Vittorio Mortarotti tackles the theme of beauty by combining it with the concept of transience that is reflected, in the form of a portrait, in the figure of the teenager and in the features of a fragile landscape.
“Umbrae transitus est tempus nostrum is an inscription on a fresco attributed to Giorgione that brightens the east wall of his home, the museum, in Castelfranco Veneto.
I am writing this in October 2019. For our life is like a fleeting shadow. During my first few days in Castelfranco Veneto I walk a lot. I look for parts of the city where it is undergoing transformation. For signs of fragility. Matteo tells me that there are two sides to dereliction: it can create hardship but also beauty. Can beauty be a transformation?
Bit by bit, I become aware that Castelfranco reminds me of the town I was born and grew up in. So I start a game in which I superimpose pictures from my memory onto pictures there in front of my eyes: the bowling alley, terraced houses, wrought-iron fences, palm trees, water mains towers, bicycle races, diving into the river, the path that leads back through the years. Echolocation is the ability some animals have to emit sounds and through the echoes that return they can locate obstacles and estimate how far they are away.
There is a time, a place, where a kid steps out across the shadow line and becomes an adult. That happened to me in 1999. I was sixteen. “Every turn of the path has its own seduction. And it isn’t because it is an undiscovered country. One knows well enough that all mankind had streamed that way. It is the charm of universal experience from which one expects an uncommon or personal sensation – a bit of one’s own.” This is the opening of Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow Line. (Joseph Conrad, The Shadow Line, Penguin Books, 1987, p. 43.) I remember the dark on the other side, but I no longer remember what that age is, as if it’s before and after that moment. I decide to photograph a group of boys and girls, all of whom are sixteen. I want to see that transformation again. Is shadow absence and is absence also possibility? This brings to mind a film I love. Bruno Ganz
asks the ghost of his wife, “How long will tomorrow last?” He is wearing a wet overcoat and is already aging, but she is still young, wearing a polka-dotted dress, and barefoot.
The reply, whitch is also film’s title, is “Eternity and a Day”. In that and in everything there’s rest.” (V.M.)
Project realized as part of the artist residency “OMNE/BEAUTY”, Castelfranco Veneto 12th-19th October 2018 and 20th-28th January 2019, exhibited during OMNEFEST (Villa Parco Bolasco – University of Padua, 4th September – 1st November 2021) and published in the book “OMNE/BEAUTY 2018-2020” (Skinnerboox, Jesi 2021)
