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 97888314032144

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

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

The artist contaminates, deconstructs : collages, lacerations of the support, threads, metal staples, manual colorings are grafted onto the photographic films and invade the printed paper. His images are investigated bodies, they are "tabulae anatomicae" to be studied with meticulous attention, autopsies to be read and re-read in search of a possible remedy to the chaos. The undisputed protagonist bodies are revealed to then be disowned, tortured and finally sanitized; you imagine 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 framework for the work, support and immobilize the gaze. Here his red threads become sutures, a medical, curative element capable of giving us back a regenerated physical body that has finally become aware of itself and its own complicated existence. The image becomes a simulacrum; the bodies can eventually be brought back to life.

(Giulia Marchi | February 2023)