HOPERAPERTA

On the thight sight

Maurizio Barberis

"...What is an image?... an Image is what is not there..."

On the tight sight

The unfinished work asks the viewer for an effort of vision, the creative effort needed to imagine the entire figure, to be able to describe a reality beyond that perceived by our five senses, an ultimate, final reality that is found at the end of every experience.

The camera thus becomes a prosthesis that captures what we perceive but cannot see. Thousands of photos, thousands of drawings. But what is the point of it all? To describe, to interpret, to change, to kill reality? But does reality really need us, our photos, our drawings, our little icons? And then, what are we talking about? The objective, statistical, mathematically demonstrable reality that applies to everyone, to an Eskimo or a pygmy, or another reality, more individual, more like the dream of a single individual?

I had a dream, a strange dream...... Can foreknowledge help us make this elusive dimension concrete?

Are dreams part of this reality, of our reality? Where else could they come from, from our minds, from the memory of the Mundus? Who or what produces the dreams that scattered around the world help us survive by confusing us? Are dreams not by chance the expression of a will of a higher order, which transcends the logical order, semantically arranged around us? Can dreams, if read correctly, not help us understand the meaning of a future happening, destined to come, but not yet among us?

Fragments

Recording an event, the beginning of an event, or a moment before the event happens. What I am photographing has not yet happened but could happen. Fragments of reality collected in a collector's spirit: the work is not complete but just sketched.  The meaning is not given by the totality of the fragments nor by a sequence that presupposes a coherent flow of time.  Like all stories, the sequence is also composed of individual fragments and an apparent order of time.

Fragments ordered, regardless of when they were collected, according to a sequence whose meaning resides in a time that distorts their quiddity, shifting perception to a level of relative automatism. The position of the photos can be changed, altered, without generating another story, different from the one we see in the world. The factors are reversed but the result does not change. Each image possesses its own individuality, determined by the here and now of a future time, not present, but nevertheless felt, and at the same time each image is constituted as the mobile fragment, not bound to its position in the text, of a superior reality whose meaning is given only by the Figure as a whole.

Prescience

It can indicate a vision so quick to grasp what time dilutes and renders invisible to the human eye through the unbroken sequence of meaning, isolating a fragment of reality and making it finally visible.  Let us not forget what the camera can do, closing the diaphragm at an impressive speed, far beyond our perceptive faculties. Take one second of time and divide it into five hundred, one thousand, two thousand parts and you get the speed through which the camera returns our perception of an object. A decidedly short time, where, however, something happens, a perceptive phantom finally takes shape, makes its existence, which is autonomous for an infinitesimal fraction of time, an eternity, an infinity destined to last forever.

It is impossible to centre this fraction of time exactly, except by approximation. It is therefore another organ, another kind of perception, that we are forced to use to be so dramatically precise. An organ that allows for some form of prescience, of fast sight, that transforms the infinitesimal part of a second into an event, or rather, into that set of signs we call an image.

A great image.

"...It is in fact through the rational activities of memory and imagination that the umbrae take on those iconic...symbolically effective forms, which become imaginal vehicles suitable for...leading man to gnosis...The philosopher...is like a painter, for to think is to operate with the imaginative faculty, to translate concepts into images: “...non est philosophus, nisi qui fingit et pingit...intellegere est phantasmata speculari

Dream

When looking at a photographic image, we must always think that we are observing an event that has already happened, something that belongs to the past and no longer exists, except in our mind and in our gaze that brings this thing back to life every time we look at it. An event that existed for a fraction of a second, bringing about an infinite number of events subsequent to it. Uniqueness of the happening and its unrepeatability: what happened once is the sum of many facts that can never be repeated the same, even if for thousands of years we were waiting for them. The image we are looking at is therefore always a temporal unicum.

 ...I had a dream: I dreamt of Matisse with an enormous camera at his side brandishing Magnus, who had the extraordinary power to reverse the process of transforming reality into a sign and vice versa, transforming signs into reality. In this way, the image ceased to be a representation of something to be just a pure and simple image. Its value was not given by the object it represented, but by the fact that it was itself an autonomous and self-sufficient object, something totally new that had never existed before. Photography thus became art and ceased to be documentation, allowing the eye and mind to reappropriate the world of signs in total autonomy...

(The texts in italics are taken from Mino Gabriele's introduction to Corphus Iconographicum of Giordano Bruno's works, Adelphi Edizioni, 2001)