El Surrealismo De Vincenzo Montella
Vincenzo Montella's photographic work is extremely complex. His photography is art, document and news. We become aware of our past activity in a graphic and plastic way, also projecting a surreal dreamlike memory of our future. Together, past and present, he composes his photographic work under digitization with developments in a silver tint that envelops him in the mist of the unknown.
One of the virtues of his photography is permanence. Montella takes her photos from her archive-visual-memory with a hint of nostalgia, with a bit of regret for the past and with irony for the future. Brings up the memory to summon the truth. His chiaroscuro gravitates between grandeur and abjection, through which he manages to give his artistic creation presence and interpretation. The interior light of his work is not regulated by the diaphragm of his camera but by his imagination and creativity. His photography is not just an image but rather the plastic visual expression of his world.
His photography is not an instantaneous operation in a fraction of a second but rather a signification of events. He works against time, his events remain continuously. What we see in his photograph happened in the past and continues to happen in the past, but thanks to his image he "presents" it. His photographs in his focus of attention do not show life, they show the helplessness of stone sculptures, of images of dreams that have stopped in their duration, that have no end, that have been released from their fate or destiny. It has detained what has been detained, an embalmed time, still, that cannot avoid escaping. If that is the focus, in the environment of his photography, in the present, the everyday is to situate the anachronistic characters in a referential within a modern duration. It is to unite the old, the static, the ruined in the alien context of the present. It is wanting to relive the present in the past. It is not wanting to activate the relic of the glorious past, it is not carrying the talisman, the amulet or the miraculous medal for the sake of a new present.
In this game between the past and the present, there is the dynamics and charm of his photography. It fixes forever a precise and transitory instant of the present and the stowed away and past, it captures it and eternalizes it. His photography, every time we look at it, makes us notice the union of the past and the daily present, we are presented with what was once the great Greco-Roman culture reigning with the current world, the values of Disney petrified in the filing cabinet of the current. The actions, things and people that appear in her photographs return to remain still and contemplated. He uses images from a glorious past stowed away, he does not reveal their canons and textures, nor their lost beauty and usefulness, he leaves them deposited wrapped in the web of the chiaroscuro veil of forgotten old age silver, seen from the new enveloping and indifferent.
On the other hand, he recovers what we see with the naked eye, his photography responds to man's strange need to search for fallen archetypes and with the knowledge that they will not be able to return to their former splendours. His photographs have the power to bring visual fragments of the remote and recent past to the surface of everyday life and to the present, thereby contributing to the reconstruction of collective memory and imagination. They are living memory, they are a memory of life that passed and that is proposed as something outdated with a disguise from an older time that is the glaze that the photographer artist has covered them, like a magical touch to turn it into the arch of the outdated.
Text: Orlando Campos R.
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