YOU'VE NEVER SEEN IT Print

Lambda Print on metallic paper on a Dibond support, ready to be hanged, this picture is part of a series which I have been working for more than 3 years In “Contemporary Existence”, the aesthetic form and social concerns evident in the work are founded upon the photographic representation of an apparently insignificant ordinariness that would otherwise remain invisible. The expressive means become, therefore, the vehicle for conveying the urban desolation and emotional chaos of a contemporary Waste Land composed of metropolitan rush hours and crowded sidewalks. New York, with its arresting publicity posters and cosmopolitan multiculturalism, has molded and inspired this body of work. The city’s streets are a singular and irresistible set of human stories. Here, the real estate boom of recent years has created a landscape of construction sites demarcated by sheets of plywood that are then encrusted with advertisements: a patchwork of colors and images destined to last perhaps little more than an afternoon. Against this temporary and shifting background we see the transitory figures of passersby, a human gallery of the hurried and out-of-breath, possessing an air of hopelessness, but also full of experience and poetry. Evocative and poignant, they become unknowing protagonists of a fleeting moment, interrupted by the artist in order to tell their stories and our own stories as spectators. The dynamic combination of color and content bent on communicating this discomfort is aided by the fragments of text seen in the posters, broken apart and recomposed to create a new text. Particularly noteworthy are the large scale and forceful impact of these life-size or, at times, larger than life posters that appear throughout the series, transporting the viewer to a street in New York.