Stephanie DiMarco
Women's Suspensions - photography
2RC Rome - 2004
Curated by Gianluca Marziani
The elaboration process, today as yesterday, includes a photographic journey that is contaminated with sculpture and installation. In the first phase, in fact, the artist creates mannequins that animate and undress / dress according to plastic movements with alienating impacts. Immediately after, he creates the sets, shapes and manipulates the lights, cancels or underlines the scenic context. Then he photographs the scenes so that the work, intended for fixing on tactile living materials (the crystal on the photographic paper allows an effect of aquatic suspension), simulates the truth through the uncovered means of fiction.
Returning to the previous exhibition entitled “Piscine”, Marziani wrote that “… the scenery of the swimming pools dominates the image. It is a liquid world of soft and intense blues, of dazzling and magnetic reflections, of direct and anomalous lights. A place of transparency that interacts with some silent, athletic, sensual bodies. In the tubs there are men and women with costumes and minimal accessories. Agile presences on the scene that recall a group of ghostly mannequins: 'plastically' relaxed as they float in that limbo between real landscape and plausible dream. The framing that involves them thus lives between truth and fiction, between pictorial imagery and a figurative volume that turns into a sensitive photographic mirror ... "
Today we see the plastic bodies but at close range, according to shots that want to confuse the gaze, investigating those physical gestures that enhance the carnality of the protagonists. Feel the thrust of the bodies, the pressure of the hugs and contortions, the sexual energies that make the scene vibrate. The figures appear hairless, naked and intense in their bright light eyes. Fetishism becomes a magnificent obsession: and it pushes itself into close skin contact, it revolves around the mouth, nose, neck ...
In parallel, according to an opposite and complementary cycle, we re-enter the water but the body disappears to recall the missing details. Waves of long hair float inside calm liquids, sometimes alone, other times together with intact petals or flowers. The suspended atmosphere drags us into a vortex of emotional doubts, between the ecstasy of aquatic freedom and the drama of a mysterious story.
On the one hand, the body with its physical presence ...
On the other, the hair that tells the mystery of the hidden body ...
Mysterious feminine suspensions, like those drifting petals ...
Questions about living femininity ...