Antonio Biasiucci

Magma

1985 - 1995

Courtesy :

This work consists of 60 black and white photographs, set next to each other one to form a solid polyptych. The 60 different poses decompose and recompose the reality perceived by the lens, reinventing it in accordance with his particular sensibility. As Christian Caujolle wrote in 1998, the photographer is condemned to fragment the world and reconstruct it indefinitely in the square and rectangle chosen as the sample-form of his vision, to give a new sense to the apparent chaos presented to his eyes (Antonio Biasiucci. Magma, Motta). Despite the fragmentariness of the shots, the paratactic arrangement gives the vision a narrative character which the viewers are called on to rewrite by following the threads of their imagination. Just as the photographer has in his turn written with light in skilful compositions of classical beauty, using as his alphabet shadow and darkness, from which emerge, even before rocks and lava, formlessmatter and its cauldron. This work is the fruit of ten years' effort by Biasiucci, starting from 1984 in collaboration with the Vesuvian observatory in Naples, devoted to the study of the volcanoes still active in Italy: Stromboli, Vulcano, Etna, Solfatara, Vesuvius, Bocche della Malvizia. Having
lived in the shadow of a volcano, Biasiucci is familiar with the profound attraction of these mountains of igneous rocks spewed from the depths of the Earth: remote places wrapped in the mythical atmospheres of a time more ancient than mankind, extreme landscapes where matter is incessantly transformed from the fluid state to the solid, from vermilion incandescence to the black roughness of stone. By cutting out the particular, that choppy, sparkling sea is translated into abstract, original and universal images: archetypes of fertility and destruction, but also metaphors of a continuous creative metamorphosis, of nature as of man.

Dragoni (Caserta) 1961
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