In Search of Appropriate Images
Mattia Balsamini
£125.00
This body of work started around early March 2020. I felt the urge to take advantage of the suspended time that we all had available, trying to learn something from it. Home and its territory have always been a mysterious combination of known and unknown. The way I find myself... Read More
This body of work started around early March 2020. I felt the urge to take advantage of the suspended time that we all had available, trying to learn something from it. Home and its territory have always been a mysterious combination of known and unknown. The way I find myself most comfortable exploring its surroundings is usually by taking into account both aspects. Looking close and looking far. A little at a time. These images were made in the difficult and surreal circumstances we are still living in a year later. They have been an exercise to train the eye, to seek some sort of meaning in the objects, atmospheres and thoughts I’ve always been attracted to. In Search of Appropriate Images tries to fulfill the need to distill pictures that represent an inner voice – and it has been an opportunity to preserve and protect them.
Here is what I originally wrote upon beginning this diary: “In the months leading up to the pandemic, I moved around a lot for work, albeit with some precaution — the projects I was working on required it and, honestly, I didn’t feel like giving up, unaware of my irresponsibility and the potential danger. Long weeks later, I’m sitting in the studio where I spend most of my day. I look out the window towards the mountains a few kilometers away, and I think of the enormous fortune of living in this house, in this area. Once a day, at dusk, I walk silently in the fields that separate me from those mountains, I photograph what is available, and associate it with older images, trying to look at everything with a new gaze — this is my exercise.”