Exhibitions, Italy, Napoli, 02 March 2016
Nature strives to imitate art, Ovidio wrote in his Simulaverat Artem. Unfortunately, today, the human greed and his wickedness are slowly destroying that nature which, silently, gives so much without asking anything in return but proper respect and attention necessary for its preservation.
The space in which people live their daily lives and in which they act is never neutral; it was space of nature with everything that goes with it, for better or for worse, until the man has not begun to carve his own signs, symbols of his passage that are slowly turning it.
It transmits anxiety to know that, already in 1920, Benedetto Croce, then Minister, in a report to the Senate wrote that in our country would have to do the impossible to cease "unjustified devastation against the best known and most popular features of our soil".
After almost a century by these words, the human impact has reached an unprecedented speed and depth of influence. The effects are varied and they are literally changing the face of our planet and of our daily life.
The watchful eye of Danilo Donzelli captures the sad details of these inexorable changes; and does so with a weapon often used in art history: the irony.
In this regard the historian Henri Morier, in his Dictionnaire de poétique et de rhétorique (1961), wrote that the irony is the expression of a person who, animated by a sense of order and justice, is irritated by the reversal of a report that he estimates natural, normal, intelligent and moral. With laughter we can stimmatizzare these situations: this is a way to fix these situations .
The curtain opens and the spectators begin their journey at that Luna Park, in an amusement park in which to play is only the man without ethics or morals; a man that mortifies nature to chase after his interests;
So the Gulf of Naples, seen from a distance by a rock with the features of a human profile, seems to be waiting, almost resigned, another massacre; a massacre that we can catch in the next shots: the cement that hides and conceals the horizon; a beautiful blue sky whose contemplation is impossible; road signs abandoned in the grass and that grass that try to live with them, embracing them.
Donzelli plays with the elements of composition of his photographs; The shots by Danilo Donzelli return images full of hope: the nature doesn’t want to surrender to ugliness carried out by man; it seems to constantly seek ways to not succumb to them. Every effort seems futile when the viewer's eye rests on bright and full of joy colors of the concrete mixer that, we imagine, continues unabated to turn, to produce cement, to build walls and monsters that will make the nature and landscape their personal Luna Park .
"The landscape - wrote Salvatore Settis - is the sick man of Italy. Just look out the window: we will see townhouses where yesterday there were dunes, beaches and pine forests, we will see lofts awkwardly perched on roofs that were harmonious, on terraces already airy and flowering. We will see forests, meadows and fields go back every day because of the invasion of sad condos, we will see bright coastline and verdant hills devoured by incongruous houses and buildings without a soul, we will see cranes rising threatening everywhere. We will see what was the beautiful country overwhelmed by inexorable concrete casting” .
Donzelli would like to rebuild or highlight a link between the work of art (the photo in our case) and the environment; a link able to produce a new vision of landscape and, at the same time, to provide the tools to decode it and carry it out in everyday life. The works in the exhibition run at the same time, the level of ethics and the aesthetics; they are able to coincide in its completeness truth and beauty.
I think that the Donzelli’s shots give a new dialectic mediation, quoting Susan Sontag , between the imperative to "beautify , which comes from the fine arts, and the truth [...] which comes from the sciences" since, borrowing the words of photographer Robert Adams, “if beauty is the true end of art , [...] the beauty that interests me is that of form, synonymous with the coherence and the underlying structure to life” .
A photograph is the description of a moment without which itself would cease to exist; and it is precisely that moment in space and time which should help to change our consciousness of the world. According to Danilo Donzelli photography is, therefore, an indispensable tool to have "visual memory" of the incidence of man on the landscape and its interference on nature: it is therapeutic photography as reactivation instrument of perception and human sensitivity; I Think it is a visual discursive device that can establish links and cross-references between the action (the act of taking a photograph) and narration (what does it mean shooting). Although it is true that "to see is to have distance" , this distance allows Danilo Donzelli to look and realize that we are approaching more and more to a point of no return.
Luca Palermo
The space in which people live their daily lives and in which they act is never neutral; it was space of nature with everything that goes with it, for better or for worse, until the man has not begun to carve his own signs, symbols of his passage that are slowly turning it.
It transmits anxiety to know that, already in 1920, Benedetto Croce, then Minister, in a report to the Senate wrote that in our country would have to do the impossible to cease "unjustified devastation against the best known and most popular features of our soil".
After almost a century by these words, the human impact has reached an unprecedented speed and depth of influence. The effects are varied and they are literally changing the face of our planet and of our daily life.
The watchful eye of Danilo Donzelli captures the sad details of these inexorable changes; and does so with a weapon often used in art history: the irony.
In this regard the historian Henri Morier, in his Dictionnaire de poétique et de rhétorique (1961), wrote that the irony is the expression of a person who, animated by a sense of order and justice, is irritated by the reversal of a report that he estimates natural, normal, intelligent and moral. With laughter we can stimmatizzare these situations: this is a way to fix these situations .
The curtain opens and the spectators begin their journey at that Luna Park, in an amusement park in which to play is only the man without ethics or morals; a man that mortifies nature to chase after his interests;
So the Gulf of Naples, seen from a distance by a rock with the features of a human profile, seems to be waiting, almost resigned, another massacre; a massacre that we can catch in the next shots: the cement that hides and conceals the horizon; a beautiful blue sky whose contemplation is impossible; road signs abandoned in the grass and that grass that try to live with them, embracing them.
Donzelli plays with the elements of composition of his photographs; The shots by Danilo Donzelli return images full of hope: the nature doesn’t want to surrender to ugliness carried out by man; it seems to constantly seek ways to not succumb to them. Every effort seems futile when the viewer's eye rests on bright and full of joy colors of the concrete mixer that, we imagine, continues unabated to turn, to produce cement, to build walls and monsters that will make the nature and landscape their personal Luna Park .
"The landscape - wrote Salvatore Settis - is the sick man of Italy. Just look out the window: we will see townhouses where yesterday there were dunes, beaches and pine forests, we will see lofts awkwardly perched on roofs that were harmonious, on terraces already airy and flowering. We will see forests, meadows and fields go back every day because of the invasion of sad condos, we will see bright coastline and verdant hills devoured by incongruous houses and buildings without a soul, we will see cranes rising threatening everywhere. We will see what was the beautiful country overwhelmed by inexorable concrete casting” .
Donzelli would like to rebuild or highlight a link between the work of art (the photo in our case) and the environment; a link able to produce a new vision of landscape and, at the same time, to provide the tools to decode it and carry it out in everyday life. The works in the exhibition run at the same time, the level of ethics and the aesthetics; they are able to coincide in its completeness truth and beauty.
I think that the Donzelli’s shots give a new dialectic mediation, quoting Susan Sontag , between the imperative to "beautify , which comes from the fine arts, and the truth [...] which comes from the sciences" since, borrowing the words of photographer Robert Adams, “if beauty is the true end of art , [...] the beauty that interests me is that of form, synonymous with the coherence and the underlying structure to life” .
A photograph is the description of a moment without which itself would cease to exist; and it is precisely that moment in space and time which should help to change our consciousness of the world. According to Danilo Donzelli photography is, therefore, an indispensable tool to have "visual memory" of the incidence of man on the landscape and its interference on nature: it is therapeutic photography as reactivation instrument of perception and human sensitivity; I Think it is a visual discursive device that can establish links and cross-references between the action (the act of taking a photograph) and narration (what does it mean shooting). Although it is true that "to see is to have distance" , this distance allows Danilo Donzelli to look and realize that we are approaching more and more to a point of no return.
Luca Palermo
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