critical text by Lea Mattarella
Immediately, as soon as I looked at them for the first time, the architectures framed by Paolo Mazzanti’s lens made me think of Cesare Brandi’s travel books. It seemed to me that they shared with the great art historian the same way of grasping and confronting detail, the same astonished gaze of one who knows things and yet understands that they must still be discovered.
As if they showed the different degrees through which one can delve into the world, as if reality had to be unveiled little by little, stratification approached without haste, because in the end it is patience and slowness that make the difference. Long ago I stopped loving speed: I like to go slowly, to linger with my gaze.
And this is what I seek in art, what I pursue—so to speak, naturally—the praise of slowness. With all due respect to Marinetti. Now, I imagine that Paolo Mazzanti discovers the secret life of the things he frames by observing them for a long time in silence, patiently grasping what, little by little, they reveal to him. Milan, Venice, and Urbino were the stages of this journey of his in search of buildings, in a slow pursuit of light, colors, and forms.
It seems to me that for Mazzanti photography is precisely the exact opposite of the snapshot. I imagine him absorbed in taking aim, as if he had only one bullet left and could not afford to miss. He lies in wait: a sniper perched on a rooftop who must hit the target in order to restore the possibility of beauty. What does his sight aim at? History—or rather, and this is truly a concept that can be traced back to Brandi, what we carry within us of history as memory, the only thing we can truly see because it is sedimented inside us: the trace of a passage. Otherwise, places as extremely well-known as Milan Cathedral and St. Mark’s Square in Venice risk no longer being seen at all.
These images are exact, even when they unfold, when they show sequences of columns whose arches can only be intuited, or when they present details that, thanks to the artist’s maneuver of approach, are transfigured. For Mazzanti, encircling the object, assaulting it from the standpoint of detail, is not a way of observing it, studying it, or perhaps capturing it, but of increasing its mystery. Just as happens with the shots preceding the architectural series—those devoted to landscape and natural life—once again Mazzanti frames in order to acknowledge an autonomous, elusive life, and precisely for this reason a fascinating one.
A life to be continually sought, digging this time among stones, in previous works among water, earth, and the green of plants. Exercises in contemplation. There is another thing that immediately struck me in Paolo’s latest works: the gaze directed upward. Most of these images focus on parts of buildings that are high up, on a portion of the world suspended between earth and sky. Capitals, overdoors, architraves, windows, the upper parts of arches, statues overlooking balconies. These are the places where he exercises his continuous confrontation with the instant and with the object, most often arriving at a “classical” result, a formal perfection that seems to exclude humankind. Are these spaces inhabited? Almost never. One can sense the fervor of the humanity that created the monument, appreciate its genius, even imagine its toil, but it is a distant evocation. Today these buildings live an existence that is independent of everything else.
And it is with this existence that Mazzanti comes to terms, as if he were fully aware of Marguerite Yourcenar’s conviction that the true life of a work begins the moment it is finished, and that it is realized through adoration, admiration, love, but also through contempt or indifference.
The artist seeks to tell the story of buildings—or rather, to let them tell it themselves. He creates silence around them so that their sounds may be heard, to allow “the groan through the centuries to resonate in the ears like sleepless forests,” to borrow Orhan Pamuk’s words. Even what he has created from these celebrated images—from the lace-like stonework of the Doge’s Palace in Venice to the Lion of Saint Mark—does not escape the same destiny: photography lives in the moment it detaches itself from its creator, grows far away, under unknown eyes that must be capable of discerning its most intimate truth.
The risk they run, shared by all works of all times, is to be looked at with carelessness, crossed by distracted pupils. The antidote to this is not, as happens in much contemporary art, the gimmick, the idea that immediately captures attention and vanishes just as quickly. Mazzanti’s urgency is to show beauty, a necessity that knows how to be patient and never makes him waver or oscillate. The framing is certain, the light assured. There is no disjunction between image and meaning, none of that mystification so common today that ends up denying the pleasure of contemplation, because a work is deemed valid the more complicated, incomprehensible, and inaccessible it is.
Here everything is simple: we are faced with the strength of a storyteller who narrates using our own language. He takes things capable of coming from afar and makes us want not to let them slip away. Those Venetian golds and blues seem to contain all the Orient of our imagination, meeting that of travelers of the past—merchants of fabrics, brocades, and spices. Journeys and mirages, as De Gregori would say. So could it be that, if one knows how to look, reality is neither ugly nor predictable as it seems? You glance above your head and find that solitary statue intent on declaiming its incredible truth to the sky, as if it were there to possess the horizon and allow you to imagine it. Anything can become an epic poem, a collection of verses, an encyclopedia of ideas, a map of unknown depths, the true story of stone heroes. One simply has to know how to look. Everything is still, because an agitated surface does not reflect, whereas here the mirror of exactness is sought—a mirror that has always survived, perhaps hidden but unbreakable. Mazzanti dismantles and reassembles the architectures before him as if they were pieces of a gigantic game.
Amazement and curiosity draw us onto Milan Cathedral, where the artist has taken photographs that seem to stage an entire city. Thanks to a mysterious and unexpected way of framing them, it feels as though these sculptures move, perform gestures, speak to one another, live. And they have been there for centuries. Wonderful. Ancient spires that become skyscrapers of a future metropolis. And you are left there wondering how.
Because the artist has meticulously prepared the perfection of that moment, far removed from suffering and contingency, transporting us, arch by arch, colonnade by colonnade, to a place where wear does not exist. And staying there for a while is not bad at all.
April 2008