Beatrice Pediconi
By Nicola Davide Angerame
Segno 222 (December 2009)
Beatrice Pediconi’s latest photographic series represents an emblematic example of process art. The photograph registers the performance of the material, of colour and of light. It belongs to a broad spectrum of art that reflects on the developmental process of things, or, better, on the formational process of the image, no longer understood as a representation, but as an organism that draws vital nourishment from action, more than from form. Biological processes are the model. This is process as birth and organic growth of the idea. Pediconi’s photography is the expression of an art that is interested in the processual nature of events, going beyond the static and legislative limits of Minimalism, the rhetoric of narrative-representative art, and the pompous dryness of symbolist-iconic art. Pediconi’s photography, recording the performance of the elements, represents the transcendence of “staged photography” and of the new objectivity. It is a performance over which the artist does not have complete control, having to adapt her own “desire for form” to the physical reality of the materials used. There is an experimental component in this work with water, light, inks and tempera, that renders the photograph an unexpected surprise. As seen already in the preceding series entitled “Subtle bodies”, in this new and specular series, “Untitled”, one also finds the taste for photography understood as “capturing a moment” in time. The camera snap stops and records, but does not interrupt and does not complete the relationship between the subject portrayed and the camera. In this sense, the object portrayed constantly retreats and flees toward its future evolution. The photograph that results is an open work that can be considered first and foremost as a “sequence” whose individaul components, the single images, are in a consistent evolutionary relationship. It is not a true series, but rather an evolution with an organic character.
Like a scientist in the laboratory, Pediconi utilizes the photographic instrument to capture and analyze a process that produces ephemeral forms, unstable moments resulting from meetings projected and guided by the artist, but marked by chance, by the unforeseen micro-events to which the material, like life, is subject. In as much as it is an art of process, the author’s photography lends a sense of consciousness to ephemeral events, events that in their transitory nature strike the “retina” of thought, launching multiple and ambiguous sensations at the mental decodification system that tends to “recognize” in them the images of existing things, even while being aware of the absolute abstraction of the work.
Winner of the award for best author at the VII Biennal of Experimental Art in Saint Petersburg with the series “Subtle Bodies”, Pediconi presents this new series of works characterized by the absorption of light and by the breakdown of space, space that becomes an abyss and challenges the spectator with a provocative loss of orientation. The cardinal points merge and the co-ordinates of space are made ambiguous. The complexity created by this Roman artist offers the dynamics of the internal, personal voyage with its visions, flashes of inspiration, flickers of ideas, or the explosion of emotion; a voyage guided by the “hallucinations” that make us read in a stain the existence of a cosmos or of a marine abyss. They are legitimate and rational readings, but also reductive: we are not in front of Rorscharch tests or dreamingly teasing forms out of passing clouds, however much the mechanism that these “stains” stimulate in the mind is the same. Pediconi’s images offer instead suggestions created by an unstable material and by the fluidity of a structure created in a personally-constructed laboratory. In this way the “daily miracle” of human intelligence is performed: like when a poetic verse “reproduces”, evoking form and substance, an emotion or a profound sensation even in their absence. Pediconi does not aim to create a precise form, but leaves her work “open”. Her photography is not serial as much as “processual”, that is, it realizes the registration of an open process that arises from a meeting between the will of the artist, the natural behaviour of the elements, and the laws of phyics.
This photography is the product of an approach free of ideology, in a historical moment in which artistic expression uses conceptual research not so much as artistic meta-language (as Duchamp or the Minimalists did), but as intellectual adventure aimed at contemplation in itself by the artist. This adventure strives to situate the artist’s work inside a system of co-ordinates at the centre of which is no longer found any preconceived idea (of art or of the world), but rather the Self, placed before the immense emotional and intellectual expanse represented by the spheres of the personal and the social, once these are no longer blocked by pre-established ideological systems. In this space, opened by the fall of ideologies, Pediconi’s work inserts itself as experimentation and the search for a new photography, as it has been defined by the Brazilian master Vik Muniz: “if you want to photograph something new, first you have to create it.” The idea of a photography that has exhausted its own subjects, clears the way toward new frontiers opened by the end of the identification of photography with objectivity. The new photography, from Gregory Crewdson to Shirin Neshat, Vik Muniz to Thomas Demand and Georges Rouse no longer objectifies, if anything it “subjectifies” making the external world re-enter into emotional and formal co-ordinates that rule the private world of the artist. The same discourse holds for Beatrice Pediconi, who goes beyond explicit biographical stimuli in order to structure her own productive system, a system in which the image represents neither the beginning nor the end, but only a step on the path of an open and more vast process. Here matter is put into action and the play of the gaze, which usually dominates that which it watches, becomes an equal element in the active dynamic set up between the viewer and the work of art.