9-8-1960

All works: Nicoletta Deva Tortone
Photographic reproduction of the works: Flavio Tiengo
Texts: Giulia Marchi, Giulia Capotorto, Nicoletta Deva Tortone
Italian language
Format: Hard cover, 25x25 cm, 128 pages
Limited edition: 100 copies
ISBN 9788831403214

Nicoletta's practice is an alchemical practice. A bodily action, a discipline of action, a divinatory doctrine in search of the self. The artist moves like a soothsayer and examines the depths of his work; films and images sacrificed in search of the "templum", the sacred space towards which he projects his personal celestial vault.

His work speaks of the essence of the body and its language, it speaks of the chemistry of photography, of memory, of denial, of death and transformation. Use photography as a possibility for dialogue by making eros and thanathos, sacred and profane interact (...)

The artist contaminates, deconstructs : collages, tears in the support, threads, metal staples, manual coloring are grafted onto the photographic films and invade the printed paper. His images are bodies under investigation, they are "tabulae anatomicae" to be studied with meticulous attention, autopsies to be read and reread looking for a possible remedy to the chaos. The bodies that are the undisputed protagonists are revealed and then denied, tortured and finally sanitized; the images are a connective tissue made of memories to heal and wounds to heal. A construction/deconstruction process where the lovely remains saved from the fragmentary but original images provide a scaffold to the work, support and immobilize the gaze. Here its red threads become sutures, a medical, healing element capable of giving us back a regenerated physical body that has finally become aware of itself and its complicated existence. The image becomes a simulacrum; the bodies can eventually be brought back to life.

(Giulia Marchi | February 2023)