Giuseppe Persia

«Nus Noûs: nus as naked, noûs as mind. Two words distant as meaning but united together to name the photographic work of Giuseppe Persia, fruit of an artistic journey started in the 70s. This path is distinguished by the otoginality of the ideation and outcomes that led the artist to realize in photography what is most easily obtained in painting or in sculpture. They present themselves as eidetic entities that go beyond reality and sensible experience even though they evoke it in various guises and in seductive, mysterious and sometimes disquieting forms. In this conceptual research Persia makes the speculative dimension prevail, aimed at investigating the surreal world of the unconscious, a germinating unconscious from which both verisimilar entities and mysterious yet emotionally involving entities emerge.» (Giovanna Calvo Di Ronco)« Photography is an expressive medium that, in addition to being a powerful tool for investigating and re-proposing objective reality, also knows how to be equally valid, its opposite, reproducing the illusory and the unreal. This ambivalence is expressed in the works of Giuseppe Persia who proves capable of dealing with the photographic language making full use of the expressive and allusive possibilities. In his images it appears clearly how the element of ambivalence turns into a subtle elaboration of the mind that takes us away from reality to lead us into an imaginative labyrinth composed of evocative suggestions and visions. They are simple peppers but able to suggest bodies not without a sensual and mysterious charm. All this is made possible by the skilful use of close-up shooting techniques, combined with black and white reproduction on silver gelatin photographic paper. The absence of color, in fact, more easily allows a de-contextualization of the subject, favoring a reinterpretation freer and free from visual and preconceived structures. Here then appear images that are read according to their own emotional level, configured in interpretative models that draw on the areas of the mind and the unconscious. It is a question of participating in an intuitive and sensitive game, where the elements of rationality are not valid, as much as the coherence to concepts of perceptual freedom, at the same time lyrical and imaginative.»