ARTE CONTEMPORANEA ED EVENTI CULTURALI

Swann Art Gallery

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Swann Art Gallery

+39 333 2455018

info@swannarte.com

Galleria d'Arte Contemporanea ed Eventi Culturali

“… La guardava; un frammento dell'affresco appariva nel viso e nel corpo di lei, e da quel momento cercò sempre di ritrovarvelo, sia che le fosse accanto o semplicemente pensasse a lei…” M. Proust

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IMAGEVINTAGE.IT

BAGLIORI DI ROSSO e altre storie

a cura di Riccardo Dellaferrera

05/03/26 - 03/04/2026

The exhibition brings together artists with different backgrounds, sensibilities, and artistic styles—from figurative to abstract photography, from the surreal to documentary and reportage—invited to engage with a common theme: black and white, interrupted by a minimal yet decisive presence of color. This chromatic intrusion within the monochrome disrupts the apparent unity of the image and transforms into a narrative, symbolic, and perceptive sign.

Since the medium's origins, black and white has represented the primary condition of the photographic image, over time becoming synonymous with essentiality, memory, and testimony. Color, which only fully emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, was long perceived as exceeding the presumed objectivity of the photographic gaze. Representing it today as a selective detail within the monochrome means reactivating that historical tension in a conscious choice: color not as decoration, but as event.

From this perspective, the chromatic irruption makes visible the moment in which the image declares its interpretative nature. Photographing is never the same as passively recording reality: it means choosing, isolating, removing a fragment from the flow of the world and transforming it into representation. The artists in the exhibition strive for an emblematic form of expression of reality, capable of adhering to it and, at the same time, revealing its distance. The insertion of color into black and white can be read as a sign of this leap between world and image, between reality and vision.

In the exhibition, monochrome emphasizes structure, contrast, and memory; chromatic detail, on the other hand, introduces an immediate perceptual threshold. Vision neuroscience shows how brightness and chroma are processed separately by the visual system and how an isolated chromatic stimulus rapidly emerges from the image field, orienting attention. Color thus becomes a point of condensation of meaning: a semantic trace in the image as a whole that activates the awareness of the gaze.

Within this theoretical and curatorial framework lies the experience of the Imagevintage.it collective, founded in 2010 by Lorenzo Avico as a space dedicated to photography and imagery. Born as a virtual space for sharing, the project brings together artists with different backgrounds and stylistic approaches, united by a rigorous approach sensitive to the many facets of photographic language. The project—which also presents itself as a constantly evolving online "collection"—includes images capable of telling stories, arousing emotions, and stimulating reflection: from reportage to visionary landscapes, from intimate portraits to almost painterly results, from portraits captured in the moment to underwater worlds, and even experiments with the relationship between form, light, and shadow, and the dialogue between man and nature. The different research does not dissolve into fragmentation, but rather constructs a dynamic and articulated whole, in which differences become a critical resource. Beyond its digital dimension, Imagevintage.it is a vibrant community: a context for ongoing exchange where exhibitions, projects, and individual and collective experiences fuel new directions of research. The authors—Lorenzo Avico, Maria Erovereti, Marilaide Ghigliano, Eleonora Olivetti, Roberto Goffi, Roberto Semenzato, Maria Paola Soffiantino, and Marcella Tisi—compose a different visual panorama, testifying to the vitality of contemporary photography and making sharing a driving force for growth. In this intertwining of curatorial research and collective practice, Susan Sontag's thought perhaps offers a key to synthesizing this brief presentation: Sontag reminds us that photographing means appropriating the world, collecting fragments of it, transforming experience into an object. Photographs are not reality, but isolated portions of it: constructions that shape memory, perception, and consciousness. Each image is both testimony and artifice, trace and interpretation. The tension between black and white and chromatic detail that runs through this exhibition makes explicit precisely what Sontag identifies as the problematic core of this art: photography is never an innocent recording, but a cultural gesture that selects, frames, and attributes meaning. Tiziana Avico's poetic language will discreetly insinuate itself into each work on display, revealing intimate and further resonances.

Riccardo Dellaferrera, February 2026