This monumental first retrospective on Giovanni Chiaramonte is truly unmissable, organized thanks to a decisive collaboration between the CSAC – Centro Studi Archivio della Comunicazione of the Parma University (founded by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, a friend of Chiaramonte and curator of the exhibition) and Fondazione Monteparma. Hosted in the premises of the APE Parma Museum, the exhibition, open until February 9, unfolds through four hundred images, classified into 26 project themes by the great Lombard photographer from Gela. “La fotografia come misura del mondo” (Photography as a measure of the world) is the title given by the curators to this very long journey into the poetics of the photographer, full of human presences, landscape elements, silences, lights, constant search for the divine in the particular, continuous references to the cinematography of Andrej Tarkovskij. Those who visit it are faced with the coexistence of conceptual and realistic elements, geometries and perspectives, and never lose sight of the essence of the photographic art of Giovanni Chiaramonte, who stated: «Photography is writing with light for an instant in a permanent way». Faced with an impeccable installation that is capable of not making the visitor lose his or her bearings, we will apply here in the review the method put in place during the visit: chronologically following the mass of works exhibited in a possibly chronological order that begins in 1970 and ends forty years later, around 2010.

Giovanni Chiaramonte, “Gela”, from the “Ultima Sicilia” series, 1970, ph. courtesy APE Parma Museo © Eredi Giovanni Chiaramonte

Giovanni Chiaramonte’s early work is a return to his origins: “L’ultima Sicilia” (1970) is a black and white project that photographs the living souls of villages blinded by the sun, in their daily movements, shot in moments in which the blinding white of the sun and the sheets hung out on the street vibrate like the black of old women’s dresses. The following year we move on to “Numerazione Desolazione”, a project that the title effectively conveys. We are in a place in Milan far from the limelight: the numbering is that marked with white chalk in the parking spaces and the desolation is that of a parking lot created from a bombed building that, free of rubble, becomes a horizontal structure told in eleven shots. “Sequenze nel tempo” is the story that occupies the two-year period 1973-74 and causes a destabilizing jolt. The photographer transports us between the skies and into space, photographing, in the darkness of the room, spatial images coming from the television. The final result consists of imaginative triptychs and polyptychs that push us into reality through mediated language. We return to the beloved Sicily and to photographs that capture reality with the project “Giardini in Sicilia” (1974), in which Chiaramonte devises a more poetic title to represent, in truth, the bewilderment of those who no longer recognize their origins and the world they have lived in. His eye is a pendulum between two worlds, being the child of the classic Italian emigration era of the economic boom. As we now know, Chiaramonte’s photographic art also oscillates towards the conceptual to which he returns with the project “La Creazione/Neon”, also from 1974, thanks to which he provides a direct homage to contemporary artists who used neon as a material. We are faced with a luminous line, a circle that radiates light and other virtual signs that, in reality, intend to tell us that light is not just a line and the other is not just a circle.

Giovanni Chiaramonte, “Vela-Gela”, from the “Terra del ritorno” series, 1985, detail, courtesy CSAC- Centro Studi Archivio della Comunicazione dell’Università di Parma © Eredi Giovanni Chiaramonte

1974 was a fertile year for Chiaramonte: another project was presented in the exhibition, “Discorso di Natale” in which he took up the stylistic elements of temporal sequences and offered us images of the pope at the time, Paolo VI, while he announced his Christmas speech. If the element of time seems well-defined, Chiaramonte destabilized us by introducing the window of his own apartment, also immersed in the darkness of the room, almost as if to act as a conceptual pendant to the large window from which the pontiff looked out. And again in 1974, Chiaramonte created “Dov’è la nostra terra”, a project that embraced various Italian and foreign locations and that was very much centered on the meaning of images and signs. The window object returned four years later with “Finestre”, a thematic series that proposed what can be seen from the inside: the lens began its depiction from inside the room to propose what it could capture through the fragile obstacle of a curtain, of glass, of perspective. “Verso il celeste” from 1978 embraces, with a title revealing Chiaramonte’s deep faith, the cause against consumerism. The photograph of a model’s body stands out in this thematic project, portrayed on a billboard with a giant red heart, while an alienating urban suburb looms in the background. As in the Sicilian gardens, also in the project “Giardini e paesaggi”, the gardens fundamentally belong to the metaphysics of the title: in this series, in fact, the photographer shows us a comparison between the present and classical culture by including, in the square format of the scene (the garden is a place of very rigorous planning and mediation), fragments of ancient statues crossed by shadows. The central photograph of the series “Paesaggio italiano” (we have entered the 80s) is the shot of a shelf of the photographer’s home library, with some reference texts of his poetics and sensitivity clearly visible: the presence of Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Sartre, Florenskij denote a cognitive flow that draws on metaphysics, Christian faith, existentialism. “Viaggio in Italia” is the gravity center of this period and of the years to come for all Italian photography. It is impossible not to associate the name of Luigi Ghirri with this intent of revealing our social and cultural identity through the photographic tool. Giovanni Chiaramonte is among the absolute protagonists of this fundamental passage (twenty photographers are included in total) and contributes with some photographs necessarily contiguous to Ghirri’s poetics.

Giovanni Chiaramonte, “Via Dolorosa, Jerusalem”, 1988, courtesy Fondazione Monteparma © Eredi Giovanni Chiaramonte

In 1984 the photographer proposes “Vitriol”, an acrostic that induces to coordinate the divine macrocosm with the human microcosm. The window of a room returns (a metaphor of the internal-external passage) and strikes for example a labyrinth on the asphalt, an expression of the deceptive in which man can get lost. “Terra del ritorno” is an itinerant project, through some important cities such as Porto, Berlin, Athens, Istanbul and Jerusalem and, first of all, Gela, the city of origin of Chiaramonte’s family. The symbolic photo of this series could be the bow of the sunken ship directed towards the west, almost to represent the return to the place of life. “Attraverso la pianura” is a project of social investigation: Chiaramonte portrays the marginal, the oblique, everything that, on the sides, moves around the fast communication routes. It is 1987 and, in the same year, the photographer also begins the project of greater temporal scope (it will include two decades) and verticality on “Venice”. In this context, his gaze meets the essence of poetry that the atmospheres of the city give to his sensitivity. The city is often depicted by intertwining its main element, water, with the sky, thus creating in Chiaramonte that sense of peace so often evoked. Almost at the same time, the photographer arrives in “Berlin”, a city that he investigates to highlight its cruel historical destiny. The triptych of the urbes is completed with “Jerusalem”, a place that is a constant in Chiaramonte’s gaze: we are still at the end of the 80s and the capital of the three monotheistic religions evokes both the fideistic fulfillment of the believer and the need for dialogue between cultures that are not very distant from each other. A shelter in the infinite landscape and a solitary tree in a square are the symbols of a new journey of questioning the contemporary Italian landscape. The two thin verticalities are at the centre of “Penisola delle figure” in which, in addition to definitively adopting colour, Chiaramonte enters the decade of the 90s. The theme, already present, of the return to the West is also central in “Westwards” (1996), ‘towards the West’, where the photographer catapults us to the edge of a swamp from which an alligator emerges, observed with calm habit by the locals (we are in Florida) and in the city the “neoclassical” columns of American homes are dazzling. The Latin American world is geographically very close to the US coasts and is the centre of the “Oceano latino” project: the evocative title embraces the trips made by Chiaramonte to Mexico, Panama, Trinidad and Cuba. The spectrum of subjects depicted is very broad and includes signs of the great religious devotion of those peoples with the revolutionary and anti-capitalist spirit that has permeated, in some cases, their recent history.

Giovanni Chiaramonte, “Duomo”, from the “Cerchi della città di mezzo” series, 1999, detail, courtesy Fondazione Monteparma © Eredi Giovanni Chiaramonte

“Ai confini del mare” is a long-term project, in fact it covers the decade 1985-1995. The photographer returns to Sicily, specifically to Gela and its surroundings, and depicts a dilated, extended Sicily, with infinite spaces that look towards geographical horizons. The decade 2000 opens with a return to conceptuality and the city of Milan is the scene depicted in the thematic series “Cerchi nella città di mezzo”. The idea behind the project is to portray the metropolis from the outskirts towards its centre: and in the centre, the focus of this entire journey, a couple kisses at the foot of the Madonnina del Duomo, with a very symbolic reference to the photographer’s credo. The theme of dialogue between human beings finds fulfilment with the project “L’altro_nei volti, nei luoghi” (2010), in which he explores the social margin again. The photographic journey winds between Palermo and Milan and portrays the faces of those who do not belong to the European Union. Chiaramonte portrays these people, often invisible, in a triptych in which the central photograph shows their face, while the lateral ones show the places they live in and the work tools they use. The immanence of the earthquake is the focus of “Interno perduto”, a photographic project centered on the damage caused by the earthquake that shook the south surroundings of Modena on May 31, 2012. In this case, the necessary individual sensitivity often intertwines the compositional art, with greater rigor in the lines and in the occupation of space within the images. Finally, the thematic series “Salvare l’ora” is also contemporary, a photographic journey from 2011-12 that unites the photographer’s poetics with the specificity of the interior form of the haiku. There are 70 polaroids accompanied by 70 haiku written by the photographer and the project is very well explained by the photographer’s direct words: «they are light traces of the divine presence hidden within every form and figure that shines in the world». The exhibition is accompanied by the voluminous monograph “Giovanni Chiaramonte” by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, the editorial debut of Electaphoto, a project of the Electa publishing house.

Info:

Giovanni Chiaramonte. Fotografia come misura del mondo (Photography as a measure of the world)
10/11/2024 – 9/02/2025
APE Parma Museo
Via Farini, 32/a – Parma
www.apeparmamuseo.it

Giovanni Crotti

I am Giovanni Crotti and I was born in June 1968 in Reggio Calabria to be reborn in June 2014 in Piacenza, the city where I live. My income is guaranteed by digital consultancy, and I then spend it largely on art and letterature: I have been and am a content curator and organizer of cultural events for artists, galleries and institutional spaces, as well as a writer of exhibition reviews, creatives of every era and books.