the sincerity of poetic meditation.
By Pietro Marino
Gazetta del Mezzogiorno (10 may 2007)
With alternative methods and sophisticated techniques, an exhibition currently on display in Bari go ‘beyond photography’.
Beatrice Pediconi — A basin of water in the open air. A syringe to distill drops of India ink. A camera. So the mysterious images offered by Beatrice Pediconi are born, from these (seemingly) simple ingredients. The young Roman photographer made a name for herself, not very many months ago, with a solo show of an entirely different character in Castello Svevo. There she presented, and successfully, exterior-interior photographs of ancient and modern architecture, interpreted as primary geometries, in constructive rhythms of space and light. The photographs now on display in Marilena Bonomo’s gallery — namely a space dedicated to art — appear instead like paintings with an informal-abstract intonation, paintings without colours, or acquatints made with soft incisions. They play on the absolute chastity of faint black forms, thread-like signs that slowly un-make themselves, stains and swirls wandering in spaces of indefinite clarity, paths that largely become expansions of auras in jewel-like greys. They evoke stupor and melancholy, they exhaust themselves in a kind of zen meditation.
No technological artifice, in the shooting phase or in that of development and printing, no intervention aside from the discrete help of forming and dissolving the ink in the water, presided over the birth of the images: only the careful choice of the “decisive moment” (as Cartier Bresson would say) to capture the right photographs. “Rightness” not so much in an aesthetic sense — the balanced relationships that are constructed, the surprise of internal rhythms, the sober elegance — as in a psychological one. The “interior necessity” theorized by Kandinsky. The wait for the image that is to emerge, in a way similar to that of ancient diviners. A complex web of cultural references can be recognized behind this unusual (and risky) photographic approach. Yet despite appearances, these works are anything but ‘abstract’. Because — between shivers of water, dissolves of ink, and variations of atmospheric light — what Pediconi pursues is the mystery of reality, on the borders between the germinal moment and its undefining. Fundamentally, she examines, with self-conscious reticence, herself. It is these images that are her liquid mirror.