IN SOMNIA

Teresa Emanuele, a Roman artist with numerous solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad to her credit, works mainly with black-and-white photography, experimenting with the three-dimensional and kinetic potential of projecting shadows of prints onto transparent surfaces.

He debuted to theater in Athens in 2013 at the Onassis Cultural Center, when his work Ecfrasi Triste made from set design to _Cercles / Fictions _by Joël Pommerat, directed from Iannis Leontaris of Kanigunda Theatre Company.

Inspired by the excitement of seeing her own vision make from background to a play, the following year she created the set design for the second act of _L'importanza di chiamarsi Ernesto _directed from Geppy Gleijeses, which debuted at the Teatro Quirino in Rome and then toured throughout Italy.

The exhibition _IN SOMNIA - Act One _is a collection of photographic works conceived as theatrical set designs. from always passionate about theater, opera and ballet, Teresa Emanuele creates black-and-white models for the fairy-tale enchantment of Swan Lake, for the tormented passion of Rusalka, for the pathetic sadness of Pagliacci. Again, he places the melancholy of the graceful _Giselle _in a fairy forest, and reinterprets the poignant notes of Norma in a Sicilian key. Instead, his Don Quixote struggles against a contemporary field of wind turbines vibrating in the wind.

Thanks to sketches by students of the Rome Academy of Costume and Fashion, the characters come to life on these imaginary stages where lights, shadows and reflections blend with acting, music, singing and dancing in an evocative reinterpretation.

ROOM WITH A VIEW

Teresa Emanuele's photography

The history of art has accustomed us to to consider its production as a subjective practice of the eye bending to its own image and likeness the real by means of the tools of language. The image is always the consequence of a fold, of a twisting of the eye around its own field of vision, of a movement that is irretrievably subjective and affective.

Photography, on the other hand, has introduced an anaffective procedure, a mindset that seems best to do the reckoning of things and rip the skin off reality. A commonplace assigns to photography the place of cruel objectivity, the sense of a surgical practice that dissects, cuts, and removes detail from the network of relationships with the world.

The distribution of roles thus assigns to the artist the place of the eccentric gaze and to the photographer that of the static gaze, to art the privilege of indulging the disease of subjectivity and to photography the task of developing the impossible attitude of impassibility and neutrality.

Italian photography practices from many years a tangency with the world of art and artists, turns this cliché upside down and introduces into the sphere of the image the typical twist of anamorphosis, which belongs to the history of painting, rigorously employing the tools of photographic language. He puts himself in the position of the duel: the photographer, confronted with the given, does not let his finger snap on the camera precipitously, but rather promotes a series of relations and mirroring, whereby he arrives at the image by means of a mental slowing down and the assumption of a position of laterality with respect to his medium.

The photograph is not random and instantaneous, it is not the result of elementary doubling, but of a posing that complicates and makes ambiguous the reality from from which it starts. A twist modifies the image, in an attempt to introduce the eccentric into the sphere of vision. If all this produces the result of obscuring, of interdicting the frontal view ofopera, the executive process requires the rigor of construction.

Photography in this case often uses the view from above in precisely the sense affirmed from Goethe of the irony that is released in detachment. Thus we have almost cinematic images of interiors that contradict their intimacy through the descriptive capacity of an everyday life halted by painting.

The detachment arises from the engorgement of a language that builds a "siege" to reality but does not delude itself that it can identify with life. Here the vision is wedded to the literary and at the same time extremely figurative one that meticulously and metaphysically describes a reality as an occasion for pure cataloguing.

Man acquires the speed of an imagination that can act to eyes open or closed.

Italian photography builds its chambers of the gaze, "still from machines," of an almighty and childlike gaze from above capable of dominating large territories where life pulses in its details and particulars. Such characters become the visual structure of an abstract yet concrete system of seeing, descriptive and synthetic analysis by quality of a concentrated space within the boundaries of a labyrinthine and at the same time familiar vision.

The photographer employs the same "civilized hypocrisy," using materials and conventions that represent and at the same time deny representation between abstraction and figuration. He oscillates freely with pleasure and pain constructing present and allusive images that are close and also distant.

Proximity is dictated by the choice of material and visual convention that affirms and confirms the precision of the gaze. Distance is represented by the philosophy of the gaze itself, which knows its possibility and also contains the memory of a contact now impossible from to realize and reconstruct.

Achille Bonito Oliva