Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least if that no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane…
James JOYCE, ULYSSES
A few years ago, during the opening of an exhibition I was holding in Switzerland, a fine collector of artists’ books approached me, asking if I was familiar with James Joyce, and if I was interested to create a project for his unique collection.
Since then we exchanged an intense correspondence and, as the collector described it: “He was able to infect me with the Joyce virus… a positive one for your life and health”…
The series of photographs “ULYSSES” would like to explore new paths in the maze of a book open to multiple readings and infinite interpretations.
Through several journeys (and a long separation from my homeland), I have been following invisible strings connected to the ephemeral strolls of Leopold Bloom. Ceaselessly I went back and forth from James Joyce’s text to the places he still haunts, like Trieste, in Italy, where the author wrote the first pages of his masterpiece, and spent several years after his own exile from Dublin.
With a wondering mind, weaving words from the Ulysses and combining traces, signs, and lights, I meant to refer as well to Joyce’s parallel use of the Odyssey and to the metaphysical characteristic of his text. That is, in using the myth, the Ulysses is capable of existing and indeed does exist, in several distinct and different forms at one and the same time.
In an endless dialogue with the intriguing and evocative words of the Ulysses, the images aim to express both serenity and wandering, tracing the course of a familiar but enigmatic journey.