Davide Mosconi

Davide Mosconi's photography ushers in one of the leading and most significant themes in twentieth-century art and culture: chance. To avant-garde movements, chance was not simply the negative opposite of necessary conditions and rules, but an active component of creation and of reality.  Mosconi first seeks it out and makes it the subject of his work, and then uses it directly as a compositional tool.
Here he creates triptychs on various subjects, first using two images he found, one from the world of art and the other from other spheres, such as the worlds of science, advertising and information, where he discovers an unexpected analogy, which he then proceeds to highlight by adding a photograph he has taken from scratch. It will not escape the viewer's notice, in fact, that Mosconi has re-photographed the first two photos, doing so through the particular medium of a Polaroid camera, which clearly reveals the re-photographing technique since the stage of negatives is missing from the process. The subjects vary: first there are the triptychs of the series In morte del padre (In the death of the father), an allusive title which also suggests the killing of the past, of history, in order to be able to create the new; then come the triptychs on night skies and daytime skies, followed by those showing parts of the body, food, fires, shadows and others besides.
Mosconi was particularly interested in the sky, viewing it as a sort of framework, a background, a support, like a sheet. The next step for him was to “draw” with objects and materials – such as dust, the most evanescent and unstable, as well as 'corpuscular' and stellar material – in the sky and the sky itself, the air.  Here chance is master, doubly so, yet again, because it is chance that creates these configurations, and chance that is recording. But is that not the very essence, or the foundation, of the photograph?  Even what we call order, is that not a particular instance of chance? But, that way, what is highlighted about reality is its internal unpredictability, impermanence, intangibility, all ingrained in the image and in creation.
An incredible “coincidence” is that the last series Mosconi produced before he died – shortly before this series and also featuring the sky – was Autoritratti bucati (Punctured self-portraits), in which he punctured holes in his self-portraits and re-photographed them, with a mixture of drama and irony that conveys the whole apotropaic meaning of the gesture of puncturing, tearing, defacing, smashing and opening up at the same time, and, as Fontana had taught, engaging simultaneously in composition and disfigurement. This is chance, and so is photography.

Davide Mosconi (1941-2002) moved to London in 1961 and studied photography at the London College of Printing. From 1963 he worked in New York for four years as assistant to Richard Avedon and Hiro. He returned to Milan in 1967 and held his first solo exhibit entitled Il sogno di Davide (David’s dream) at the Il Diaframma Gallery.
In 1968 he opened the “Studio X” photography studio, through which he produced advertising campaigns and fashion and society photo-calls, while working simultaneously in music and video-art. In the early Eighties he produced the Triptychs dealing with the theme of “coincidence” exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Working on concepts of “contemporaneity” and “chance”, he made the photographic series “Disegnare l’aria” (Drawing the air). He then devoted himself to the series “Polveri” (Dusts), with works inspired by Bruno Munari and dedicated to him. His last work, “Autoritratti bucati” (Self-portraits with holes), was exhibited posthumously in 2003 at the San Fedele Gallery in Milan. Throughout his life he contributed to numerous prestigious exhibitions all over the world and to the Venice Biennale Festivals in 1991, 1993, 2001 and 2003.

 

Info:
Cloisters of San Pietro
via Emilia San Pietro 44/c  - Reggio Emilia
tel. + 39 0522 456249 / 451152

Open Times:
6th May - 12th June 2011
Opening days: 6th - 8th May 2011
Visiting hours (exhibitions at institutional venues):  6th May 6 pm - 12 am, 7th - 8th May 10 am - 11pm from 10th May Tuesday - Friday 9 pm - 11 pm, Saturdays, Sundays and National Holidays 10 am – 11 pm closed on Mondays.
Tickets: 10 € single ticket includes admission to all the exhibits