The Deconstruction of the Visible | There are gestures that do not belong to the world of things. The project ventures into the heart of the choreographic gesture as a radical act of transcendence — a vertiginous impulse by which the human dares to restore form to that which has none, to offer visibility to that which by its very nature eludes the gaze. In this limit-experience, we human beings acquire the extraordinary capacity to deconstruct our own finitude, to dismantle it piece by piece, with the same patience of one who undoes an order that seemed definitive, only to reconstruct the real: that of the body, that of the world, and the intimate, fragile bond that holds them together. The gesture thus becomes a tension toward the surpassing of the reified self — reduced to an object among objects, stiffened into the forms the world has imposed upon it. Through choreographic movement one exits the visibility of the object to inhabit the more living and restless visibility of the living body; the limbs grow saturated with the imaginary, movement patiently excavates the boundary of our finitude, and in the absolute here of the gesture something elsewhere surfaces — sudden and necessary. In the expansion of that tension, worlds become visible: near yet unreachable, possible yet suspended between the visible and the invisible — worlds that only the danced human gesture can graze in their most hidden essence, thus unfolding new and unexpected forms of existing.

These photographs seek to preserve the mimetic power of dance. It is a mimesis, however, that does not dwell on the surface of outer forms, nor reproduce the concrete actions of things, but ventures into the most daring of attempts: to see the human condition moving through the mysterious recesses of existence, where light never fully reaches. Rarely do gestures appear frozen, for the instantaneity of the choreographic gesture is by its very nature transient, irreducible to fixity. In movement, the dancer feeds on subtractive acts, on small deaths, and offers us visions that let the gaze pass through them without holding it. The visible moment passes, and what it leaves behind is not an image but a trace — the symbolic quintessence of that transience which is the truest signature of human nature.

Apulian and Arbëreshë by origin, Neapolitan by adoption, Paola Francesca Barone brings to her photography the sediment of a deep humanistic formation — classical languages, Sanskrit, philosophy — as if each image were the visible precipitate of a thought seeking form.

The camera enters her life as a child, through her father’s hands: a 1950s Zeiss, at once inheritance and initiation. A self-taught artist, she moves through the territories of architecture, landscape, and minimalism, until arriving, in 2019, at self-portraiture. It is the lockdown that offers her the suspended time needed to dig deeper: from that silence, a poetics of lightness is born — one that does not relinquish density.

Her visual research feeds on philosophical speculation and takes form as body in the image. What she pursues is what Ortega y Gasset calls the intracuerpo— that amalgam of sensations, emotional, psychic, and phantasmatic flows that pass through us without our always being able to name them. Her projects follow the rhythm of interior time: they arise from impulse, from the urgency of replicating the motifs of the soul. Identity, reason and psyche, the self and the other, the masculine and the feminine, social norms and cultural symbolisations — these are the territories she traverses with a style that oscillates between the graphic and the oneiric. Her photographs are often accompanied by her own texts, and realised through artisanal techniques — such as print transfer — that return to the image the trace of the hand.

Her work has been exhibited in group shows throughout Italy — Naples, Rome, Florence, Milan, Turin, Venice, Matera, Narni, Livorno, Castel Fiorentino — and in a solo exhibition in Catania, as well as at international venues including Arles, Budapest, Tokyo, Berlin, Dortmund, New York, Tucson, and Barcelona. She has received awards and recognition in competitions of international standing, among them the Minimalist Photography Awards, Budapest International Foto Awards, Tokyo International Foto Awards, Inoventa Awards, International Color Awards, International Photography Awards, Monovisions, Best Photography Awards, Umencia Photo Awards, Photora, 1839 Awards, Oneyeland Awards, PX3 Photography Prize, LICC, Luxembourg Prize, Chromatic Photography Awards, and national and international festivals (Narnimmaginaria, Medphotofest, Les Rencontres d’Arles off circuit, Liquida Foto Festival, Rewriters Photo Festival).

Her works are published on some of the most authoritative platforms and journals in the field: L’Œil de la Photographie, Dodho Magazine, LensCulture, Collateral Magazine, Artdoc Magazine, Fine Art Book Awards, ContempoArte Magazine, L’arte che mi piace, Figgi Magazine, Peng Magazine, Rewritersmag, Spectaculum Magazine, NART, Quadro Magazine, Artego Magazine, Focus Magazine, Marika Magazine, and many others, as well as in Volume IV of Giorgio Bonomi’s study on self-portraiture, published by Rubettino.

All Images © Paola Francesca Barone

Model: Giulia De Girolamo