PAD. 25 - STAND B71
GIUSEPPE RIPA / SEASIDE
The author's osmosis with the fragile Italic landscape is transformed into a conceptual counterpoint that evokes hidden geological rituals, survival actions, myths and legends, ancestral memories ... the photographs speak of universal actions, shared dramas, necessary transformations; they are not a simple document but an extension of the duration that overturns fragility into a clear metaphysical event.
HOME GROUND (polyptych of 9 color photos from the Seaside series)
Giuseppe Ripa, through his photographic work on the shores of the Adriatic Sea, has recreated a relationship between the fragility of the territory, its memory and the habitation principle as the basis of the organized nucleus.
Home Ground is born within the Seaside project, one of the author's most challenging cycles. It is a journey in stages along the coasts of the country ... Here, along shores of sand and backwash, waste is deposited in free transmigration, here memory becomes a place of fossil fragments and detritus with high emotional connotation.
Giuseppe Ripa: Home Ground - translatable into "own home" or "habitat" - is an invitation to reflect on the sense of community and being together ... in the photographic polyptych sea huts are depicted as primordial modules of housing, you enter and come out at the same time, as opposed to the recent tendency to delimit and build walls…
The artist uses a double register: on the one hand he documents the places in their status, restoring the rawness of randomness, the breath of the invisible drama, the power of the simulacrum; on the other, he interacts with the disorder and gives to some fragments a new entropy, composing them (wood, plastic, iron...) according to the archetypes of the domus without walls, of the fragile refuge, of the impossible barrier. It is a double step between observation and action, thought and method, randomness and control. It is a narrative approach that superimposes layers of reality, without emphasis, in the geometric silence that redefines the essence of a photograph.
A chessboard that reshapes the fragments in the compositional process, challenging fragility with the solidity that the composition recalls. The sequential scheme adds interior temporality to places, recreating a metaphysics of the landscape: with architecture that dries up to the zero degree, with humanity that appears in traces, with a Nature that dictates the rules of the image and our imaginary.
FORGETFUL & FORGOTTEN (8 colour photographs from the series Seaside)
We see an old mattress in four sinuous positions, almost like an erotic body, simulacrum of something that happened, far from the shore ... we see other lost pieces, floating, plastic fragments ... dignified objects, permanently alive, resistant beyond catharsis, indomitable signs of a complicated coexistence between Man and Nature. Signs of struggles that have occurred, of tragedies and dramas that still pulsate, like an underground beat, continuous and implacable...
Giuseppe Ripa: Forgetful and Forgotten are the earthquake victims who have lost the memory of their past and do not recognize themselves in the precariousness of their present, just like the migrants to cite two examples of our recent history...
From the presentation of the curator Gianluca Marziani of "Home Ground" and "Forgetful & Forgotten", belonging to the Seaside cycle by Giuseppe Ripa, exhibited in Spoleto in June 2017 respectively at Palazzo Collicola Arti Visive and the Fuller’s Spoletosphere (site-specific) on the occasion of the 60th edition of the Festival dei Due Mondi (The Festival of The Two Worlds) and the Laboratory for Reconstruction.
Credits: Gianluca Marziani, Stefano Boeri, Raffaele Scircoli
www.giusepperipa.it

mpefm ITALY fair art press release