SENZA TITOLO | MARCO SIGNORINI

 Deep gaze, bright eyes and teeth in sight. A dog observes us, between curious and threatening. We, together with the photographer Marco Signorini, hesitate in front of this creature. On the sand there are the footprints of a machine, an extra clue that allows the creation of a hypothetical narration that can reconstruct the scenario of this image, part of the photographic project Earth II.

 The black and white and the play of light and shadow that characterize the work also manage to abstract it from a simple landscape photograph: the observer finds himself immersed in a dreamlike dimension, caught in a deep sleep wandering through wastelands ready to host adventures and unexpected encounter. The dog in front of us instantly becomes a character in this lucid dream. Dogs, it is said, are able to smell danger, in this case the protagonist takes a pose that suggests to be careful, perhaps he wants to activate our perception of an ongoing danger, not so easy to access. The landscape becomes the pretext to enter a timeless narrative, photography escapes a role of representation or documentation, but it becomes a dream that Signorini manages to enclose in an image that wants to suggest the reconstruction of a relationship with nature and with the world that seems to fade into our present.

 Earth II investigates man’s inability to understand and perceive the reality that surrounds him, opposing this attitude Signorini tries to establish a new relationship with the landscape and with nature. In the artist’s images, this feeling of nature is never bucolic or idyllic but rather full of menace and gray areas: a dream that takes very little to turn into a nightmare. Then the gaze returns to the traces of the car, the element that perhaps worries more than the gaze of the dog, which has almost become our friend and guides us to take us towards an area of light. Signorini’s images are signs that want to bring us to awareness, through the resumption of attention that seems to be asleep.

 In this almost lunar landscape the gaze then wanders, gets lost and clings to the smallest details, to the glitter that can be glimpsed in the distance, the footprints in the sand and again the dog’s face. Perhaps we are not so far from this landscape, perhaps it is enough to look out a little more into these visions to rediscover that sense of belonging and innate communion.

Marco Signorini
Senza titolo, Earth II, 2011 © courtesy the artist

23/04/2022