Empty rooms no 50 (After Hammershøi) - Limited Edition of 5 Photograph

A work from the "Empty Rooms" series. The empty interior as a variation of still life here activates an old iconographic strategy that never compromises. In my "remembering gaze," the ajar door recalls the paintings of Danish painter Vilhem Hammershøi. Like his, my photography is a reflection on the effectiveness of narrative, the role of light as parergon. The contemplative mood, the iconic-spatial complexity, the tension between the partial opening of space and the simultaneous closing of access to it, between the present/visible and the absent/hidden in the shadows and behind doors - all these, in dialogue with the Danish artist's painting, prolong perception, drawing the viewer into a peculiar game. As in many of my works, this photograph invokes the notion of quotation as the guiding principle of re-presentation, which refers back to other images that I "invent" in real space. As in my other works, the formal language I have used here is important: black-and-white photography, the pictorial field is disciplined according to the principles of the poet-minimalists: economy of detail, discovering hidden subtexts and allusions in unnoticed fragments of everyday reality and the mundanity of things. Sharpness, directness, simplicity of shot, precision of composition - all this shows that photography is not contingent/accidental, but, like painting, is capable of producing strong images realizing compositional order as the principle of compact and disciplined image construction (ml).