BEAUTY

The project OMNE/BEAUTY was launched in 2018 in occasion of the second artist residency organised in Castelfranco Veneto by the OMNE project.

Following the artist residency call for OMNE/BEAUTY, five photographers were selected and hosted in Castelfranco Veneto in two moments: from 12th to 19^th October 2018 and from 20^th to 28^th January 2019.

During the residency, the guest artists visited some exceptional places of the territory, such as Villa Parco Bolasco and Villa Emo, and they were involved in a dense program of meetings, conferences, workshops and exhibitions organised in occasion of OMNEFEST 2018.

For the OMNE/BEAUTY residency project the observation of places, of the original dimension of living, of everyday gestures and objects, of the borders of micro and macrocosm of domestic and collective space have represented constant factors. In their manifestation, they fostered interaction between photographers and landscape. If the identification of the relationships that exist between the subject and the object observed can help to clarify the nature of the identity phenomena of the community and the environment, it also favors the identification of the relevant factors of a territory. Without distinction of place, and without solution of continuity, the contemporary landscape seems to express the fragility of a complex system where, next to elements of value, there are undefined, homogeneous and incongruous artifacts. Compared to the environmental and built context the presence of cultural, architectural and natural heritage still seems to find a space thanks to its ability to transmit, through different expressions, a sense of timelessness that has its roots in the very meaning of beauty. But looking at the contemporary landscape, can we still talk about beauty?

Pushed to reflect on the theme, during a public meeting held at the Museo Casa Giorgione in Castelfranco Veneto, the writer Vitaliano Trevisan said that beauty is present in our territory but, in order to discover it, it is necessary to possess the ability to “know how to feel”. By “hearing” we mean being able to discover by ear, smell, touch and eyes. But in order to be able to feel it is necessary, in the first place, to suspend the judgment and remove that perspective grid that conditions our looking, binding us to a narrow vision. This reflection seems to have united the lines of research developed by the five artists-in-residence: Francesca Cirilli, Anne Golaz, Vittorio Mortarotti, Igor Ponti, Antoine Séguin.

Many other suggestions were offered by the artists during their Castelfranco residency: the public night walk by Leonardo Delogu; the literary walk by Matteo Melchiorre in the historical centre of Castelfranco; the workshop about listening to the environment held by Enrico Malatesta and Francesco Bergamo; the conferences held by Mattia Balsamini, Massimo Mastrorillo, Brent Meistre, Josef Schulz, TFTF, Petra Stavast, Damiano Fraccaro, Luca Pozzobon, Elisa Simionato, Massimo Vitali, Giovanna Calvenzi, Marco Zanta and, lastly, the discussion with lecturers Marie-Noëlle Boutin, Gilbert Fastenaekens, Anne Marquet, Antoine Meyer and the students of the École de Recherche Graphique – Bruxelles.

Developing their own interpretation of the landscape around Castelfranco, each artist created a personal photographic project: with “The City of G. or rather Giorgioneville” Francesca Cirilli collected evocative images of the figure of the painter of Castelfranco referring to signs produced by a modern imagination; recalling the love story between Giorgione and Cecilia in “The woman standing still in front of me” Anne Golaz developed a visual and textual narrative questioning the mysterious relationships of life; “Our time” by Vittorio Mortarotti addresses 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; “Beauty” is the title assigned by Igor Ponti to the investigation developed on the Veneto territory aimed at identifying, in ordinary buildings, places of iconic value; with the project “Similar” Antoine Séguin dwells instead on the contradictions of the contemporary landscape and the hypothesis of a visual mapping useful to express the characters of fragmentation.

Alongside the projects of the five artists, three unpublished works enrich the OMNE/BEAUTY project. “Panoramas of Silence. Slow incursions into the historic landscape. Monte Grappa 1987–2020” is the title of the project – in progress – by Gianantonio Battistella centred on explorations of Mount Grappa. The selected pictures for the publication refer to the 1987–1989 period, years in which the photographer used a Hasselblad SWC camera with color negatives, exposed in the form of a proof prints and composed in series of triptychs and polyptychs; “Sections of Northeast end-of-century archive” by Marco Zanta, proposes an incursion into the personal archive of the photographer from Treviso that invites us to inhabit the interior spaces of some Venetian companies in the golden age of the economy of the Nineties. The series of images by Massimo Sordi taken from the series “Around the tree”, accompanied by the original story “The Persimmon” by Matteo Melchiorre, present a double look on an arboreal species widespread in Veneto. The photographic vision of an American Persimoon tree placed at the entrance of Bolasco Park relates to the vision of a tree that narrates, through an autobiographical geography of the writer, the relationship between man and nature.

Artists-in-residence
Francesca Cirilli, Anne Golaz, Vittorio Mortarotti, Igor Ponti, Antoine Séguin

Invited artists
Gianantonio Battistella, Massimo Sordi, Marco Zanta