PRIMEVISIONI

Who is Vincent? Vincent Teriaca, 45, was born and brought up in New York until, at 20, his family returned to Italy. He has been a photographer for many years. His passion for this art form began when he was an adolescent and he fine-tuned it in photography courses in Italy and the United States before fully mastering his technique. His has been a constant pursuit of a personal style the results of which are now finding recognition through his participation in exhibitions and competitions all over Italy. Vincent’s is not everyday photography. It is an ongoing search for form and light in which feelings and states of mind alternate in a headlong flight towards a coveted but unfamiliar goal that the artist strives for without ever reaching. The inner torment between searching for satisfaction achieved following a long-drawn-out, tortuous process, and the instant acceptance of fresh challenges with testingly indefinite objectives seem to be the substantial components of his work. In this personal exhibition, he has worked on the intriguingly miraculous theme which is birth, the source of life, perceived as it develops through the eyes of a newborn child which gradually grows while the artist records some fundamental moments. Moments observed not through the eyes of an external observer but from the origin itself, and herein lies Vincent’s talent as he imagines the world through the eyes of the protagonist, of the child who is setting out on its first steps as a human being. The introspection is so powerful that in the first image only a light breaks through to lighten the dawn of life of the child, moving on to early hazy glimpses which gradually consolidate and acquire sharpness and, after a few months, reach perfection of form and colour. And so, as in a story, at the end of this short journey, that tiny being that finds itself catapulted into a world that it cannot even see correctly, begins to realise where it is and, somewhat cheekily, Vincent reveals that these feelings and emotions he lets us into are because the child that has just arrived is Vincent himself! Does it mean that it took 40 years before he managed to express himself? Whatever the reason these emotions have resurfaced in him and with a mix of mastery and ingenuousness he presents them to us, creating emotions that otherwise we would never have allowed to surface, too occupied as we are in forgetting the fundamental, simple and wonderful things in order to live a life that is at times shabby and superficial and that we wrongly believe we are living to the full. Sergio Lampo