THE PURE SENSE OF SIGHT

Marina Giannobi’s photographical research moves from a precise purpose: to capture common all day life, trying to catch in it those iper-visual energies that superficial observation cannot perceive. The artist works on this perceptive boundary, on the pure sense of sight. She enriches it by new cognitive experiences that are contributing to a sort of reconstruction of reality. Reality is then transfigured by those vital energies, which do exist and constitute it, but that only the electronic eye, in an aware artificer’s hands, can reveal and bring back to view.
Giannobi uses the camera by increasing its own technological and structural characteristics, not in an “imitative” but in a creative way. The digital camera receives then a new impulse, which is yielded and adapting to precise expressive requirements, never imposing its operative status, but sustaining its own functions alteration. That is exactly the extension of the camera’s internal program whished from the philosopher Vilélm Flusser in his essay “Towards a philosophy of photography”.
Flusser makes a very accurate analysis of all the various passages that characterize the photographical process: from the technical image’s meaning, to the specific instrument to make it (the photo camera); from the gesture of the photograph, to the concrete result of this impulse (photography) until its distribution and the reception by the public, by giving in the end reasonable explanations about the necessity of these considerations.
The basic idea can be summed up in this lighting phrase: “Change is informative, the familiar redundant (…) This is therefore also the challenge for the photographer: to oppose the flood of redundancy with informative images.”(p.65).
The “iconic bombardment” to which we are everyday submitted has actually strongly lowed our sensibility to the quality of the image, so that it is hard both to catch it and to set the right value to the image.

Immersed in a sea of light

The word “photography” literally means “writing with light” and in Maria Giannobi’s work this technical characteristic becomes the predominant subject, the original matter which is generated and molded by the artist’s creative touch. The artist makes a gesture, a movement of the hands which is physically impressing a light shift on the lens. It is an impulse able to alter and transform the phenomenal datum in a new reality, which appears as it was immersed in a “sea of light” investing and transfiguring everything with his energetic emanation.
In the creative and operative method of the artist the relation to light - without which things, reality and the whole universe would not exist - is so close and crucial to actively determine its transforming action on the surroundings. The environment is then losing its peculiar objective characteristics in order to reach a more charming and involving atmospheric rendering.
Chromatic spectrums, warm emanations and iridescent vapors are originating from bodies and things in a marvelous blaze of vitality. In this way the artist seems to be able to catch moods, emotional vibrations and vital intensities with her electronic eye. She succeeds in photographing pure energies of reality as if they were generating themselves from a wonderful and daily “aurora borealis”.
What seems to be clear at a first glance too, and what actually determines the perception of every piece effect, is the presence of high luminous contrasts and the absence of “naturalistic” chromatic references. Every image results as if it was filtrated by a film, which was able to “dematerialize” forms and to flake off objects’ and people’s profiles. This film is transforming everything that is laying before the look in vanishing lightly beams that are crossing the whole visual field, softening its depths and therefore keeping active the consciousness of an actual and concrete spatial dimension.
The study of the space and of his physical and atmospheric characteristics is an important side of Marina Giannobi’s visual research. Space is not thought as in the simple shape of a container, but rather in his specificity of environment populated by concrete and active presences interacting with it. There is not just the physical movement of the gesture touching the camera, but also the movements of the artist herself and of the people living in this space. By their shifting trough the room they are causing continuous energetic and heat streams, which are perceived and given back in their absolute visibility by the photographical lens.
We actually have the sensation of a photogram’s sequence composing a particular visual route, a spatial-temporal recognition which is catching just the pure essence of things, letting down what is superfluous and setting off just the substantial internal structure of life and things. 

Oh the occasion of this solo show of her, Marina Giannnobi presents some works belonging to the Reconstruction series. This is a research starting from the actual “deconstruction” of objective reality by means of a sequence of releases made within imperceptible shifts of time. Reality finds its whole accomplishment in its complete “reconstruction” through a complex process of recomposition, which is also involving the audience’s active sharing.
This series is composed by sequences of images taken in different places, indoor and outdoor, which structural framework is undergoing just minimal variations on framing, brightness and sometimes on chromatic dominants. As main feature it is showing a dynamism that could be traced back to the first Futurism researches and productions, as to flats penetration and to the total fusion of the surroundings and everything that is composing it in a downright “reconstruction of the universe”.

Translation by Maria Cristina Strati