«We continue our promotion of artists who, originating from these places or connected to the Parma territory, did not receive the attention they deserved during their lifetime». With these words, Carla Dini, General Secretary of Fondazione Monteparma, introduces the extensive anthological exhibition dedicated to the photographer artist Aldo Tagliaferro (1936-2009). Promoted by Fondazione Monteparma, in collaboration with the Aldo Tagliaferro Archive of Parma, CSAC Communication Archive Study Center of the University of Parma and two art galleries, the Parma-based Niccoli and the Bergamo-based Elleni, the exhibition, hosted with an excellent exhibition layout in the spaces of APE Parma Museum, is titled “Aldo Tagliaferro. Works in Space – Representation between Reality and Memory”, and is curated by Cristina Casero, director of CSAC and professor of History of Photography and Contemporary Art History at the University of Parma. «Aldo Tagliaferro – adds Casero, who shares with the artist both a birth in Legnano and subsequent adoption of Parma – is a very conceptual photographer who investigated the phenomenon of image consumption, focusing on the role of the viewer. Aldo never followed trends and thus remained on the margins of the market». Among the critical impressions that visiting the exhibition conveys to the observer, this attitude at the boundary between artist and scholar that he assumed during his long creative career is very important.
Aldo Tagliaferro, Premio San Fedele, 1965, ph. courtesy Fondazione Monteparma
The vast anthological exhibition is structured across fifteen chapters introduced by the artist’s reflections that also guide the critical and emotional approach of the viewer. It begins with journalistic photographs depicting reality (often of social struggle) because Tagliaferro had explicitly stated (in the mid-60s) that photography should adhere to reality. A neorealist and political position that the photographer would soon abandon to adopt metaphysics and experimentation as guides for his creativity. Thus, laboratory reworkings of photographs about Black consciousness or the drama of the US war in Vietnam unfold before our eyes. The second chapter also seems like a parenthesis compared to what Aldo Tagliaferro would become. The Legnano artist, in fact, frequented the artistic circle of the Botteghe di Sesto San Giovanni, alongside visual and pictorial artists such as Agostino Bonalumi, Enrico Castellani, and Antonio Scaccabarozzi. Even the immediately subsequent phase of Tagliaferro’s creative path sees him exceptionally adhering to a movement, that of Mec Art, theorized by Pierre Restany and including renowned artists like Mimmo Rotella and Elio Mariani.
Aldo Tagliaferro, “Donna Ragazzi Retino Positivo Negativo”, 1970, courtesy Collezione Christian La Monaca, Bergamo
In 1969, the artist photographer began to theorize and disseminate his poetics, asserting it with conceptual expressive forms. Tagliaferro thus began to penetrate not only the artifact but also its experimental possibilities, analyzing from within the image and its combinatorial possibility. Works belonging to this phase peremptorily affirm these concepts in their titles: “The combinatorial possibilities woman + screen + negative” or “Still life with woman + night + boy” are photographic works that arise from combining multiple images (the artist declares four) and using the screen both as a binder and as a scanning element. Immediately following is the project titled “Analysis of an operational role”. Created in conjunction with his participation in the Venice Biennale, the project involves juxtaposing distant elements (such as the work of some artists and the warning signs of a zoo, or the replacement of monumental figures in the Gardens with these misleading zoo signs). The effect is that of surreal multiples that capture attention thanks to the unintentionally grotesque effect of these photos which, in Tagliaferro’s intentions, were meant to be informative (as mentioned in the introduction, this was a constant element of the photographer’s poetics).
Aldo Tagliaferro, “Verifica di una mostra”, 1970, courtesy Collezione Juliana e Luigi Franco, Torino
The constant dialogue with the viewer’s sensibility is confirmed with the thematic work entitled “Verification of an exhibition” which, created as in a cinematic sequence, shows the entire emotional range that can arise when a visitor wanders inside an exhibition. In 1977, Tagliaferro’s poetics focused on the search for the instinct-rationality dualism with the title “Evidence through everyday living – Analysis of dualism in one’s role”. A Dutch man in a public park undresses to imitate the statues placed there; law enforcement officers arrive and invite him to get dressed and then remove him from the park. The dualism mentioned is evident when analyzing the alternation of attitude: the man goes from instinctive to rational, while the police, rational when inviting the man to get dressed, then become embarrassed (and therefore irrational) when the man begins to put his clothes back on. “Identification – of one’s availability” also plays with a dual attitude: two windows are the protagonists, one photographed from the inside that, through seven phases, opens completely; the other photographed from the outside that follows the diametrically opposite path. The photographer’s intention is to ask the observer in which of the two situations they might identify themselves, with the subtext of the futility of this game, since the action of the two windows, through two opposite paths, is the same.
Aldo Tagliaferro, “Analisi di un ruolo operativo”, 1970, 4 strisce, 325 × 66 cm, Collezione Juliana e Luigi Franco, Torino
Even “Identification – theater transposition”, while bringing photography to the theatrical stage, shows an authorial intention similar to the previous ones: what interests Tagliaferro is recording the reaction of the spectators to a performance and the identification of actors with the characters they play. The research always focuses on the sense of destabilization that the scene must evoke. At the threshold of the ʽ80s, the artist’s gaze and research turn to himself: “The self – portrait” is a journey within his own image, expressed in three ways. We see Aldo Tagliaferro frontal, we see the back of his head, we see him in negative. The meaning of this way of self-representing is to position oneself objectively so as not to overvalue the ego, and the effect is that of a playful artist endowed with great and necessary self-irony applied to artistic research. A sort of mapping is represented by the thematic project “Objectified identification”, in which Tagliaferro explores the possibilities of ways to represent a pair of twins. Before our eyes unfolds an enormous black and white photographic papyrus that contains the infinite iconographic variants with binary code: one front and the other back, one right side and the other front, and continuing so in an almost infinite series of possibilities.
Aldo Tagliaferro, “L’Io ritratto (particolare n.28)”, 1979, courtesy Galleria d’arte Niccoli, Parma
Almost a tribute to an important part of his personal sphere is the thematic project on African hairstyles (Aldo Tagliaferro, during a trip to Zaire, met his future wife). His photographic research in this project entitled “From sign to writing – Analysis of African hairstyle” begins with a photo of a female head taken in an ordinary context and then, working with an intense process of subtraction, arrives at only the sign trace of the hairstyle. In the heart of the 1970s, Aldo Tagliaferro engaged in an “Analysis of fetishism from a found image”, a thematic series that investigates the infinite possibilities of reading an image once it is decontextualized. A wall of dolls is fragmented by the photographer and to our eyes it seems to scroll like a sort of fetishistic wall of doll enthusiasts. From 2000 is the series “Above/Below a meter of earth”, the last chapter exhibited at the APE Parma Museum in this extensive retrospective. Always acting in a very conceptual manner, Aldo Tagliaferro shows us a square of excavated earth and the same portion of sky. The photographic project seems simplistic and yet the effect on the viewer (an element that, as we have emphasized several times, was central to Tagliaferro’s poetics) is one of profound estrangement. After all, the creativity of the artist photographer has always oscillated along the fil rouge of detecting a reaction and revealing it.
Info:
Aldo Tagliaferro. Works in Space – Representation between Reality and Memory
11/04/2025 – 29/06/2025
APE Parma Museo
Strada Farini, 32/a – Parma
www.apeparmamuseo.it
I am Giovanni Crotti, born in 1968, and I feel obliged to thank writing because it drives my life. I cultivate within me multitudes that lead me to investigate, know, and deepen every cultural and creative expression, and then write about it, always trying to be clear and documented in the contents.
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