notes emotion #01 Photograph

I was born (1951), lived and lives in Monza (Milan) Italy. They say about me: Gilberti first developed a love for photography in his university days, when he used to paint with oil colours, while also cultivating an interest in black and white photographs and their development. At this time he felt an irresistible attraction for the first SLR reflex cameras, as well as home-made development and printing. This was a must for all members of his generation, who had been influenced by the momentous impact of Antonioni’s film Blow Up from 1966, which is responsible for the huge popularity of creative and experimental photography in those years. [Luca Maria Venturi] These are art photographs. Fluctuating figures caught like vanishing ghosts between the sky and sea – shadows disappearing into the earth. These images exist in a precarious balance that captures a present that has already passed. A moment that no longer exists. The symbol of an ever-changing reality. Ludovico Maria Gilberti’s pictures serve as metaphors conveying a philosophical meaning. Sea, water and earth: the whole of existence in movement. And those intentionally blurred images are connected to this meaning. They are worn out in a way that alludes to the movement of all things. [Carlo Franza] This poet of photography always seeks to grasp the moment in which the camera will act as a natural gaze, seeing things ‘differently’ from how we would expect them to appear. He states this clearly, with a style close to the freedom of contemporary art. Gilberti’s reality ultimately becomes ‘magical realism’: his landscapes give the impression of being metaphysical spaces, always marked by a strongly romantic feel. His work is characterized by a particularly prominent and personal expressive language, in which cultural memory and Mediterranean art are always present, even when the architectures portrayed lie beyond our own territory. [Eraldo Di Vita] Gilberti was struck by the introduction of the digital technique, which removed alchemy and chemistry from photography. The artist experimented with the new technological formula as a way of combining his love of painting with that of photography. Gilberti does not touch up his pictures on the computer, but carries out his experimental research en plein air, creating his works through timing, diaphragms and the various technological features with which cameras are equipped nowadays. His Canon is his brush and the digital image his canvas.