Founded in 2021 this group of artists share the fact that they are emerging artists, but not young emerging artists. In fact, all the participants have already turned half a century mark. They have lived one or more significant path with their family, work, history. They faced the issues, or should we say the dilemmas, of identifying their place in the world. However, this was not enough: as frequently happens, finding many answers leads to new questions. On this research path they met, moved by a common awareness: exchange inspires knowledge. Something like when, in our twenties, among friends, we used to fantasise about adult life. With the strong energy of a group, where everyone shares what they have, while learning what they are looking for. These not-young artists bring in their works emotions and insights related to their age, to the nearness, to what has given meaning to their lives, or to what tomorrow has in store. By experiencing and then sharing themselves into a new and changing environment, that of contemporary art. They live and work in Italy. The following artists will be present at YouNique Lugano 2024: MATTEO CERVONE ROBERTO PAGLIANI LUCA ZAMPINI CARLO ZOPPI MATTEO CERVONE I was born in Milan in 1966. I graduated in Political Science and obtained a two-year specialisation in Transactional Analysis. I worked for 25 years in corporate company training as a behavioural trainer (12 years), organisational development project manager (5 years), and process specialist (8 years). In the same period, I took part in various personal journeys aimed at investigating deep feelings and desires. For years I devoted a second soul to art, but work commitments kept it away from my daily life. In 1999, I came across digital photography and it was like a thunderbolt. I began to study the techniques, the lighting principles and the culture of visual communication. I immediately felt that my main subjects should be people and moods. The refinement process was long. In 2018 I left the company and now I dedicate myself full-time to Visual Art. My focus remains the expression of relationships with others and with oneself, ironically evoked through inanimate media. While my current activity is a youthful dream coming true, or rather an important point of arrival, my artistic journey has just begun: I have so much to explore, learn and feel. The fulfilment of each new project is an opportunity to travel inside myself and meet a part of myself. Therefore, it is not only the result that is important to me, but the experience through which my work comes to light. Another Perspective – Project Statement Daily busy performing acts, crossing cities, moving toward inexistent destinations, and then returning to the starting point and beginning again: this is how the stylized traffic light men, from their high vantage point, would read each person’s life. Unable to figure out the reasons for a sometimes hurried and sometimes slow pace. They would assign the green color to pleasant actions shared by the rest of the community, and red to vices and taboos. While yellow, often the most underestimated signal, represents choice, free will, and change. In a play between real and imaginary, Photòr stages daily routines with common objects that, in their impartiality, highlight contemporary merits and flaws. www.instagram.com/photorartstudio ROBERTO PAGLIANI Born in Carpi (MO) in 1965. In young age, he wanted to become a surgical medical assistant. While he was attending nursing school, a friend told him about a specialization course in film and TV. He couldn’t sleep for two nights, then he chose to change his whole life. He suddently understood how photography is the mother of all images. Light is the gammar of the photograpy, as notes are for a musician or words for a writer. At the beginning of his carreer he faces the difficulties of the industrial photography such as: stainless steel, plastic and glass surfaces. As he was able to manage difficoult lights and reflections, then any subject is simple and pure joy. In 1983 he approached the severe and complex world of fashion photography. Fashion photography is the closest to cinema in terms of complexity: each image must carry the right message and tell a story. Pagliani had two great points of reference: the management of light as performed by Michelangelo Merisi (Caravaggio) and the narrative gift of Federico Fellini: “if you take a Fellini film, every frame is a perfect photograph”. Perhaps, the artist who has best condensed these two souls is Vittorio Storaro (Oscar for cinematography in Apocalypse Now). At thirty years old, Pagliani discovered his artistic soul. The essentiality of the body is his favourite subject. Since then, he has photographed female nudes. Having abandoned the goal of technical perfection, he is interested in letting history shine through. And it doesn’t matter if the image is rough. Dirty. Imperfect. “The message is stronger than the form”. Pagliani’s women undress. Deeply. Without hesitation or embarrassment. They make us look, straight in the eyes, at the many souls that compose a feminine being. Dark, twisted, delicate, sensual, soft… those women, thanks to this multifaceted artist, can speak. And there is the charm… their revelation, the discovery of human feelings, of the essence of what lies inside each of us. Because their story is ours too. “Fermati” Lady, who do you see in the mirror now? Who do I see when I take a photograph? I started with a few questions and a forced “stop” by the camera clicking. Those images force you and me to stop in an magical, eternal and immediate moment… we are in front of her, in front of her who is in front of a mirror. In the mirror there is her, outside of the mirror there is also her, but they don’t look like the same lady. She stuggles to recognize herself, it is a demanding process in which you, from the outside, are invited to stop. Whoever is inside the mirror calls her and shows her what to see: inside the mirror and inside her there is another woman… a woman who is firm, confident, immobile and secure, in a stable position with values, a guide, a lighthouse, a landmark. The mirror of these images does not reflect a sterile external image, already seen, but a profound and intimate vision of ourselves, which gives us calm, constancy of purpose and profound security, if we have the strength to recognize it. The swirling external reality is canceled out in the space created between the image reflected in the mirror and the internal knowledge (and gratitude). We can stop, recognize ourselves, accept that we are, perhaps, even a person we had forgotten we were, but who has always remained with us to guide us, from within, is a very profound internal process that can finally give us , a moment of peace. The swirling external reality is canceled when I take a photograph. Stopping, what leads me to recognise, who will recognize herself in that photograph? The sincerity that the image guarantees, the one that offers a mirror, if we know how to look, will we be able to accept it? Will she be able to recognize herself, deep down, how she has never changed? Cell: +39 3483828201 LUCA ZAMPINI THE TREE CALLING “”I have always loved trees. I try to render the poetry and sense of well-being that they can transmit. They are all beautiful but for some of them the call is so strong that it is really impossible for me to resist. For years I have been using photography as a means to fix the unique and unrepeatable emotions of our encounters. I would like to give the trees something more than just a beautiful composition: to show what I feel, not what I see. Through overlapping shots, in which I express thoughts and positive feelings, I create dreamlike images that I would like to invite observer to ‘listen with their eyes’ to the vibrations of the trees, to lose themselves like me among their branches to feel part of a wonderful life cycle. Because in nature each of us is a leaf, a branch, a tree…” Born in 1961, Luca Zampini lives and works in Ferrara as visual artist and freelance photographer. Son of artists, he has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad; in national and international competitions where he won numerous awards and admissions that earned him the AFIAP honour (Artiste FIAP/ Fédération Internationale de l’Art Photographique) in 2014 and EFIAP (Excellence FIAP) in 2016. In 2023 his project devoted to trees received a nomination at Milan Photofestival 2023. Recent exhibitions: a solo show at the Salone della Gran Guardia in Padua (2021), the ones at PARATISSIMA/Turin (2021 and 2022), and at the Contemporary Art Pavilion in Ferrara (2022). His fine art prints of the series “HUGS. The Tree Calling” are now in private collections in Italy, France, Spain, Holland, England, and Eastern Europe. Several of his photos are published in contemporary art and photography catalogues as well as in important magazines in the field. He is one of the founding members of the Associazione Culturale EMERGENZE FOTOGRAFICHE Guarda il VIDEO To learn more and be embraced by his thinking: CARLO ZOPPI Carlo Zoppi, born in 1964, self-taught photographer, guided by passion and instinct, says of himself that in almost all his activities he began to study when he grew up, to give a logical sense to his works: This led him to transform a hobby into an artistic and professional activity. Through photography, for decades, lends its eyes to those who can not observe details, moments, details of the surrounding world. He grasps that exact moment in which the details that strike him are more alive and keeps reality, sometimes bringing it to the limit of abstraction, to offer it to those who, for superficiality, haste, or physical absence, cannot see them. This differentiates his shots from the classic postcard: he invites you to look into the landscape, not the landscape, or to enter into the details of a face, a flower or an object, instead of admiring its external appearance, contrary to what is required by modern trends that privilege appearances with the exaltation of ephemeral beauty. In several decades of shots has combined the creation of shots often hermetic or seemingly abstract, a search for the real, up to approach pictorial hyperrealism, to find “the true” in the images, as a result of an awareness that goes hand in hand with his constant search for his own self in a path of introspection. The rush of time, even towards the end of existence, is his obsession and he is forced to move slowly to crystallize moments, situations, exciting details, always perceptible in his artistic research. Since 1996 he has exhibited in various solo and group exhibitions. His photographs are exhibited in art galleries and public places and present in private collections and institutional bodies (including the Province of Ancona, Ente Parco Naturale del Conero, Fondo Malerba per la Fotografia), others have been published in agro-environmental journals, on Plein Air, in the yearbook of Italian photographers “Foto Annual 1994” and on online art sites. In recent years he has been commissioned works in the field of industrial photography and portraiture, an area in which he also makes use of a studio equipped and equipped with a large light park (flash and continuous lights). Carlo Zoppi – Artist Statement “Photography is the tool I use to express myself artistically, in search of elements of reflection. My work is permeated by an introspective search, on the meaning of existence, of the signs we leave in the world and of how we shape it or are shaped by it, but also by the constant thought of death and what I can leave to posterity. In imposing myself not to be swallowed by the incessant passage of time, I move with a slow pace to catch moments often unrepeatable that I find in large spaces, but also in small details. I often create my works by applying the logic of lateral thinking, then I observe on tiptoe, not to disturb. Their chosen destination is that of lovers of “interior design”, collectors and those who appreciate “fine art”, as they also lend themselves to repeated readings and observations, from which new elements of interest and reflection emerge. My artistic images stand out printed on aluminum or high quality papers and medium large size and can be appreciated by those who love the beautiful, always present as it surrounds us, but often we can not perceive, because of the speed that oppresses our lives. Most of the works are produced in limited editions.” Carlo Zoppi – WORKS At YouNique – Fine Craft Art & Design Carlo Zoppi will exhibit some pieces of his production that is divided into single works and other projects (series). The series “Hills”, made in black and white, eliminating the favorite emotions from the color present in the classic photo postcard and focusing on the distinctive features of man’s work on nature, accompanies the viewer to a more meditated observation of the world around us, inviting him to stop and look carefully. The “Bubbles” series belongs to conceptual research projects and lends itself to various interpretations. In the succession of images, the author sees the cycle of life, of death, of the repetition always similar, but never equal, of the path of human existence and of every observer, as reported in the titles given to each image. The series “Closeup” is the link between a broad view of the landscape, such as in the series “Hills” and the conceptual research of meanings in some details in the series “Bubbles”. In these images there is a specific point of view that leads into a certain environment or details of elements that have attracted the artist’s attention. This series opens the door to color and abstractionism. The series “Portraits” shifts the artist’s attention to the human being. In portraying faces, parts of the body, whole figures, plays with the light and with the details, often exalting them, unlike those who try to hide wrinkles or other details, in the ephemeral search for a glossy image, too often far from the real essence of the person portrayed. The “Living death” series is intimately linked to the author’s desire to leave testimonies to posterity. Here an apparent dead element, because no longer useful or functional, is immortalized in a shot and what little remains of a fruit, a machine, a seed becomes a memory of the past and a sign of hope for the future. Nothing is dead as long as it remains in our memory. The series “Dancing in the dark” stimulated the imagination of the artist who describes his work as follows: “… Behind me, in the dark, there was a lemongrass candle that I had used at dinner to keep away mosquitoes… Here she appeared (Fiamma, that’s her name) who had danced in front of my eyes that couldn’t see, but also in front of my camera that instead, fortunately (?) had fixed her movements, her pauses, her impulses, the twists, the pirouettes, the recollections and the distensions in an ethereal fluctuate until the moment in which it has been lying to earth, tired but happy to have danced alone in the deep night…” web https://www.carlozoppi.it/ instagram https://www.instagram.com/carlozoppi.ph Richiedi contatto Fotografia artistica Viale Don Giovanni Minzoni, Jesi (AN), Italy T. (+39) 335 8071018ASSOCIAZIONE CULTURALE EMERGENZE FOTOGRAFICHE
Luca Zampini
Associazione Culturale “Emergenze Fotografiche”
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